Limbo
by AmberPalette
Summary: PostTRY. Xellos and Filia relent to their odd but undeniable romantic attraction. Disturbed, the mazoku lords intervene. One of Xellos's associates opens Pandora's Box by telling Filia about his origins. How will she react? Expanding an old oneshot.
1. A Prayer For Me

**Limbo  
A Slayers Xellos/Filia Fanfiction  
By Amber S./ "AmberPalette"**

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

**_CHAPTER ONE: A PRAYER FOR ME_**

_"Through this world I've stumbled  
So many times betrayed  
Trying to find an honest word  
To find the truth enslaved  
Oh you speak to me in riddles and  
You speak to me in rhymes  
My body aches to breathe your breath  
You words keep me alive"_

_--Sarah McLachlan _

_"You said you'd light a candle_

_And you'd say a prayer for me_

_I feel the light has dimmed and gone…_

_And maybe my intentions have been misunderstood_

_I know you feel so beautifully wronged…_

_I was your anger_

_And you were my fear_

_And now that it's over_

_Of course it's so clear_

_That you were no angel_

_And I was no sin_

_And somehow I can't let it go_

_Can't let you go again"_

_--Goo Goo Dolls  
_

The quietest individual on the veranda of the outerworld seaport town that afternoon was a slender, broad-shouldered man leaning idly on a twisted wooden staff. His age was indiscernible—true, his face was fresh and smooth-skinned, but his demeanor exuded the grace and gravity of the mature. He wore the satchel bag, swaddled tan boots, baggy black pants and cream turtleneck sari of a hermit, yet these humble articles were adorned with silk gloves, three bloody-hued spherical neck pendants, and a rich black cloak embroidered in a golden Greek motif. His skin was the palest of olive and his hair a severely neat, glossy shoulder-cut that hybridized the looks of a sweet pageboy and a stern kouros or boy-priest; in the sun its rich raven hue betrayed strands of violet and cobalt, and it severed the top and bottom halves of his heart-shaped face in an abrupt row of bangs above his eyelids. Those eyes reposed under extraordinarily long black lashes. The corners of his pale serpentine lips curled slightly, flirting with passing individuals, male and female, young and old, even though the serene inertia of his body intimated no awareness of the presence of other beings.

Then a child dashed past screaming with feral glee, stealing a bouncing ball from her male compatriot, who squealed in protest and chased her. Their footsteps clambered on the cobblestones. At their racket, the strange youth smiled enigmatically and opened his eyes. They were electrifying and mesmerizing at once, both terrifying and pleasing, as for a moth drawn to flame: hard, scrutinizing, bright amethyst daggers. It was no wonder he had kept them closed till present: they were hypnotizing, lethal, staggering.

The girl stopped, turned, and gazed at him in brazen alarm, straight on, as only children and the elderly can. The mysterious man chuckled—a smoky, diaphragmatic laugh that was more like a delighted, dark purr, till it lilted up into a higher pitched, playful sound. He tapped his small, straight nose and winked at the child. She smiled, and bashfully giggled.

In this time span, however, the boy seized his ball back from the girl. He dashed off to his cottage down the path, shrieking with triumph. The girl's smile crumbled. She cast the strange man an accusatory glare.

He laughed again, this time quite airily, and beckoned her over. His eyes were closed again, shielded by his exquisite eyelashes. His round-cheeked, smiling face, that face which was curiously young and ancient at the same time, appeared pleasant and warm, so the child strayed to his table. She was still pouting when she arrived at his feet.

The man's closed-lipped grin parted for cheerful, honey-laden words. These were crafted in a clear, soft tenor made endearingly quirky by a nasal undertone. "I have a job for you, miss. A job only someone as smart and brave as you can do. I will give you a present if you do it for me. Could you help me?"

The child gaped. She nodded. "Yes, sir!"

The man bobbed his head enthusiastically, the puckish grin becoming one of conspiratorial delight. "Oh goodness, my heavens, what a nice person you are, miss! How fortune smiles on my troubled heart today! I shall applaud you—like so!" He clapped his hands lightly, a few times, further enchanting the grinning girl. "Very well, very well! I am hungry and short of money, and it seems that the bakery of my choice only allows free bread to orphans. Would you be my heroine and go fetch me a baguette? I will make your present while you do!" He seized both her small hands in his, with a warm and coaxing touch, nose tip nearly touching that of the child.

She nodded, dancing on her tiptoes in her excitement. "Yes mister….purple haired man!"  
Again the man laughed, this time a silent sort of panting. "Sorry to have neglected introductions, my dear. My name is Xellos," he supplied after a moment, opening one eye and favoring her with his magnetic gaze.

"Yes, Mister Xellos!" The child scampered into the shop.

The man's smile faltered and then twisted into something that soaked smugness, as, in the nearby yeast-scented bakery, a hoodwinking was undertaken. He was short on neither time nor satisfaction of appetite, least of all anything so trivial as money, but necessity was not the point of his recent orchestration. Far from it.

Xellos Metallium enjoyed the taut, high, agitated pinging sound of pulling strings and human nerves. That was the most delicious gourmet imaginable.

Patience returned to his countenance as the little girl returned with the fattest butter-lathered garlic baguette she could have procured. He smiled kittenishly while taking it, removing his gloves, and devouring it before her sight. He offered her a slice, and she ate it with relish. Then he wiped his fingers clean with a napkin. He laid a hand on the jewelry around his neck, which, along with the orb topping his wooden staff, smoldered. A new ball, twice the size and brightness of the one the boy had swiped from the little girl, appeared between them. The girl gasped, grabbed it, and trilled her thanks before dashing out down the street.

Xellos closed both eyes. He replaced his gloves. He stood, twirling his staff. He sighed and snorted. "Dear God, I'm bored," he chirped. "Hooray for Beastmaster Zelas's party tonight…"

He paused, a thread of energy coursing suddenly through his body.

An unmistakable cry of his name. A cry of longing.

"Oh." He smiled in a new way now. A very different way. "It's you."

_Xellos_. The name came unbeckoned to Filia's mind, unbeckoned but unstoppable.

_Xellos. Where are you?_

An unholy mantra.

_Xellos._

It was midnight and she sat at her potter's wheel, with Valgaav tucked in to bed, with only the moist malleable material under her fingers as she turned the device with her foot pedal.

_Xellos._

_Fool. What are you doing?_

_Xellos._

There came the sound of rapidly compressing air, a coy sizzle of electricity, and the whoosh of a wind tunnel. And then….

"You called, madam ryuzoku?" A voice of indeterminable range rang gently—it was pure and thin like a tenor, whispered like the voice you hear calling your name while you are just barely drifting to sleep, a flirty trick of the mind. But richer too, deeper, and with an occasional husky, nasal dip, better suited to a baritone. It was both at once. A paradox, like its speaker.

"And apparently it was convenient for you to respond," Filia spat, not yet turning from her potter's wheel. She would give no quarter. Not yet. What the hell had she done, calling him here? It had not been the first time, and perhaps, if she had more self-control from now on, she could make it the last. "Otherwise you'd have laughed at my neediness and remained aloof."

"For your satisfaction, I'd like to claim that your tone wounds me, my dear Filia, but alas, no can do. I think it's cute." Humor leeched into that purring voice. Humor, and a touch of malice. "You know. That endless bratty indignation of yours. Adorable. Would you believe I'd actually like to satisfy you for once, instead of riling you?"

Oh, that was rich. The young dragon priestess whirled around, white boot heels squealing, with every intention of unleashing what was REALLY a scathing comeback.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

What in HELL?

No, literally.

Filia had never seen Xellos clad in anything but his nomadic priest garb, with its maroon and gold Greek motif meander at the hems of his hunter green cloak and his baggy, deceptively threadbare cream robes. This had the unfortunate effect of desensitizing her to the formidability of her adversary.

So it was with much bewilderment that she now gawped at the mazoku: baring a good deal of milky olive skin by his fully exposed hands, arms, legs, and feet, decked in gold-threaded white toga, with a great fanning Egyptian breastplate in the motif of peacock feathers and lotus blooms across his chest.

Each wrist and ankle glistened with a gold band, and a circlet of gold leaves in the manner of a Julio-Claudian Caesar crowned his violet head. On each side of the circlet, over his ears, hung exquisite feats of Aegean metalwork—jingling masses of Minoan bees with their lower torsos seductively fused as one, studded with jades, sapphires, ambers, and rubies.

His hair itself, in the bangs and the first several strands on each side of his face, was tightly braided to the root with gold thread, much like an Archaic Greek kouros statue.

He looked like one of many exceedingly desirable types of demi-gods: an Egyptian boy-priest, a sacrificial Aztec virgin, and yet the most worldly and experienced Apollo or Eros. A fertility god. A god of unapologetic bliss, and pleasure.

He was beautiful.

And she hated it.

And she hated him.

And he was beautiful.

And she loved him.

And she hated him.

And she loved him.

She loved him!

Across the top rim of his breastplate, Filia realized as she stepped closer, was a wrought narrative panel in the style of Greek red-figure vase painting, featuring, unmistakably, Xellos himself slaying representative figures of the various people that Zelas had ordered him to destroy.

Just over his heart was an incised image of a golden dragon being impaled by a javelin.

Filia recoiled as if burned, suppressing an instinctual growl.

She hated him!

Xellos's lips—irritatingly pink, full, and moist as ever—curled up like a coy satin ribbon. His eyes remained closed. "What?" He inclined his head at her in greeting, and his entire body seemed to shiver with the light off his gold armor. "Didn't recognize me?"

"Of course I did," she snarled. "Your clothing offends me!"

"_Aw_." The ghost of a pout. "Beastmaster Zelas was holding a revel in her temple and she ordered all her generals and warriors to get decked up….I kept it on when you called me because I thought you'd find me desirable like this."

"I find you desirable _regardless_ of what you wear!" she erupted, then cupped a hand over her mouth, immediately mortified. "Oh dear."

Xellos opened his fiery amethyst eyes and, for the first time in Filia's recollection, looked genuinely shocked. "Oh?" But he recovered swiftly. " I'll be damned…but that would be redundant." Perverse glee soaked into his features. His voice tripped on a spontaneous chuckle. It was a rumbling, diaphragmatic sound, unlike the frantic, sadistic giggle that he usually emitted.

"Your breastplate," she stammered. "It…"

"What about it?" He strutted in a circle around her, doing justice to the peacock feathers that adorned the article of clothing in question. Flaunting himself.

Men, apparently, behave in predictable manners, whether they are human or not.

"Xellos, take it off!" Filia shrieked. "Take it all off NOW!"

"WOW," and again he laughed, a happy color rising in his cheeks. "I should snazz up more often!" He lunged for her, eyes merry, grinning in a way that just barely revealed sharp white fangs in the sides of his mouth.

Filia lurched to one side, causing Xellos to trip over her potter's wheel, which was still running, and to collide rather enthusiastically into the ceramics shop wall. "NO!"

Silence.

"…I am slightly confused, Filia," Xellos grunted into a sea of shattered plaster. "Let's backtrack…"

"I want to know," she interrupted, in a high and thin voice, "if that is the armor that….you….if Milgaseil would recognize it."

Xellos stumbled away from the wall that he had partially demolished, shaking off drywall and debris. "Yes," he stated, frankly and calmly. He turned towards her, and his eyes were still open.

"The you HAD to know that…"

He cringed, almost apologetically, tiptoeing around her and sitting on her bed. "I was hungry."

"…that it would UPSET me to…to see…to see…"

"I said I was hungry. I needed distress for sustenance. You provided it." He stretched his long, supple limbs. "Feel honored. I find you highly reliable."

"XELLOS. THIS is why…"

"Why what?" He sprawled out on the bed on his stomach, peering at his fingernails, unconcerned.

"Why YOU AND I WOUND NEVER…"

"My heavens. 'Never' is a long time. I should know." And with that Xellos began to peel the breastplate off. "No…here. You do it. Don't be frightened."

"I can't look at it." She covered her face, trembling.

"You don't have to look at it, I am simply asking you to unlace the back."

"WHY?"

"Filia, do it." There was now an alien edge in Xellos's tone. He was unaccustomed to disobedience. Or perhaps it was more complicated than that. "It will give you satisfaction."

"It is foreign to you, isn't it?" she hissed, her aquamarine eyes sizzling as she pinioned him under her gaze. "Giving someone ELSE satisfaction. So you just barge in on me thinking you know exactly what I would want. DON'T you?"

Xellos opened his mouth hastily, the fangs near the back fully visible, the violet of his eyes heating to a warmer, truer red. His jaw muscles twitched. He hesitated, and then revised his words. "It FASCINATES me how you manage to do that to me. I have never known such a challenge as you, Filia. Yes. It is foreign to me, as you say. That is what makes it fun."

"FUN?"

"Filia, untie my breastplate." Snarl lines formed on his hauntingly beautiful face. Only Filia had ever caused those snarl lines to appear. Only Filia. "Dragon…Woman, do you ever try anything new, or are you always convinced of your own beaten path?"

"I try new things!"

"Then untie it."

She was aware of the expertise with which he was pulling her strings. But she didn't care. As long as she was aware of it, and the consent was her choice. She stomped over, thrashed down on the bed, and yanked the back of the breastplate so ferociously that Xellos, flopping upward like a ragdoll, gagged.

"Fibrizzo's nostrils, Filia!" he hacked.

"You told me to. And Fibrizzo is dead," she snipped, with more than a little relish.

"Ahaha, oh my. I TOLD you. You enjoyed that. You are satisfied."

She froze. Oh, hellfire. Damnation! "Yes, well…"

"I will make a note of that. Allowing you to beat on me brutally gives you satisfaction."

"It does not!"

"Violent, violent dragon priestess. Woe is I."

"STOP that!"

"Typical." He giggled—the more familiar, off-kilter titter, faintly reminiscent of someone addled by one too many direct-hit Dragon Slave spells.

"You are so disgusting when you laugh like that!" Filia barked, flinging the offensive breastplate off her bed. It loudly clanged to the mosaic tiled hut floor.

"Ahhh Filia, would you believe that the absence of your dulcet screeches has caused me agony?" And in one fluid gesture, Xellos rolled onto his back, laced his arms across the dragon's waist, and pulled her against him. Still, his eyes were open. It was unnerving; the pupils were like reptilian slits. "You will now react with trepidation and shock." He demonstrated with a highly exaggerated, open-mouthed stare.

She froze, mute. Did he just say he had missed her?

He grinned fiendishly. "Kiss me. You'll enjoy that, too. I promise."

"Xellos." Filia pushed away, sliding off of his now partially bare chest. Somehow the tiny peek of skin under his toga drove her madder with desire than if he were stark naked. Still she retained her focus. "Xellos, I can't do this. THIS may surprise YOU, but I WANT to…yet I can't."

"I am going to go relieve myself on a shrine to the Fire Dragon King right away," he whined.

"It…actually isn't that. It has nothing to do with old allegiances or sins."

"…Well, Filia, I am at a loss. Illuminate me, priestess who prays over my soul." He smiled; there was something softer about it. But it could have been the forgiving candlelight playing tricks.

She gathered her courage. "You once said…when we were fighting Darkstar together…when we helped Lina Inverse to save this world…you said, right to my face, 'That's the Dragon I love.'"

"Yes…I did." He made no effort to conceal that he recalled the moment as clearly as she did. "I spoke…liberally. Beastmaster Zelas certainly had… a word …with me later that evening…"

"Xellos, pay attention!"

"I AM." He almost sounded annoyed. His jaw pronouncedly twitched again. "Are YOU?"

"The fact that you said that… Does that mean you…"

"Ahhh, no." He rolled over, face drawn. "I was afraid of this."

Finally she spit it out: "Does that mean you love me?"

"I cannot say."

"You can't SAY?"

"Filia, it is forbidden to mazoku to address such a thing. It is anathema to the very cells of my body to speak of such a thing."

"BULLSHIT."

His lip quirked. "Oh my."

"It's NOT FUNNY! Tell me you love me! If you find me such a sating 'challenge,' if you are so obsessed with me, me, your 'reliable' victim, if will not leave me ALONE, at LEAST tell me THAT!"

His specter of a grin crumbled." 'Victim?' No. Filia. I cannot SAY those words. Don't you understand? It is forbidden to mazoku. Even if I ever were to feel them, I could never make such a pledge. It is against the nature of my creator. She would end me."

Filia's pride flared. "Because I am beneath you? A priestess of the fire dragon king? Because it is beneath you to feel things aside chaos and hedonism, to be like ME?!"

"It has nothing to DO with YOU!" and here an infinitesimal ripple in Xellos's eternal calm made him sit straight upright, raise his hand, point his finger at her, and shout at her. He blinked, as though shocked at himself, his hand floating down to his side. He collected himself quickly and added in a more moderated tone, "Nothing."

"I cannot be with someone who gives me no guarantees," she bleated, turning away. Forcing herself not to cry. "That is why I cannot DO this."

Xellos fell still for several minutes, eyes sliding closed at last. Something had threatened him—the shutting of his eyes was a hint that he was withdrawing, returning to his mental battle tent to strategize. Yet still he continued. "Filia, do you realize how many lovers I have had, and could have?"

"How DARE you say—"

He continued as if she hadn't spoken. "Worlds of them, in these past thousand years. And in a snap of my fingers. So many different kinds. But of all of them, this very moment, and in the foreseeable future, the lover that I want is you—you, willingly."

Once again she stared at him openly. Face red, swollen, and wet. She had lost the struggle of weeping.

Xellos said nothing to disparage her for it. Nothing—when her resultant misery might have caused his astral body further nourishment.

It was this glint of selflessness, perhaps, that made her really listen as he continued: "There is no satisfaction in force, so I will not force you. I will coerce and I will tease, but I will not force, because I tell you, there is simply no satisfaction in force for a nearly omnipotent being—there is no satisfaction in doing things simply 'because I can.' And when I look at you, there is a part of me that hesitates to let loose destructive and damaging things that would ordinarily give me little or no pause—that would, in fact, delight me. There are things that you say and do to me that make me want to annihilate you—and yet I never could. I do not know what it is you want to call that, with all your moral labels and definitions. I do not know if it is that thing that I spoke of a moment ago, that thing that is forbidden to mazoku. Nor do I pretend that it is wholly to your benefit that I have chosen you—I warn you that I can never provide you with some of the things that a creature of your world craves. But I can claim with no pretense that this thing that has compelled me to seek you, again and again, is genuine, whatever in heaven or hell it may be."

She didn't speak. She couldn't.

"Or perhaps it is not a choice. Do you think I would have chosen a creature of flesh and light if I had the choice? It saps all my energy, every time I am exposed to you. These positive forces that draw me to you drain me. For me, they are unnatural, but they consume me. You are irritatingly effective. You and your stupid high and mighty sanctimoniousness are as effective on me as my lawlessness is on you. Do you think I wanted that addiction? Filia." There was a strange growl in Xellos's voice now. "Do you think I WANTED to…?" His voice trailed.

He opened his eyes.

"It is said that old married couples finish each other's sentences."

Filia's body went hot and cold at the same time. "…love me?"

Xellos did not blink. He did not smile. He did not embrace her. "Mazoku are forbidden to say."

"But I said it."

"Yes." His eyes closed again. He smiled. "Yes. You said it." He reached out and flicked her nose.

"Kiss me." She was breathless. "Kiss me now, you creep! I…I would enjoy that, too!"

Xellos rolled luxuriously over towards Filia. "I am always right, aren't I?" he purred, leaning into her.

Her blood boiled. "You wish." She closed her eyes.


	2. Selflessness

**Limbo**

**(Another Slayers Try Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia)**

**By Amber S./"AmberPalette"**

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

_**CHAPTER TWO: SELFLESSNESS**_

_They tell you where you need to go  
They tell you when you'll need to leave  
They tell you what you need to know  
They tell you who you need to be _

But everything inside you knows  
There's more than what you've heard  
There's so much more than empty conversations  
Filled with empty words

And you're on fire  
When He's near you  
You're on fire  
When He speaks  
You're on fire  
Burning at these mysteries

Give me one more time around  
Give me one more chance to see  
Give me everything You are  
Give me one more chance to be...

Cause everything inside me looks like  
Everything I hate  
You are the hope I have for change  
You are the only chance I'll take

When I'm on fire  
When You're near me  
I'm on fire  
When You speak  
And I'm on fire  
Burning at these mysteries  
These mysteries...

I'm standing on the edge of me  
I'm standing on the edge of everything I've never been before.  
And I've been standing on the edge of me  
Standing on the edge

And I'm on fire  
When You're near me  
I'm on fire  
When You speak  
(Yea) I'm on fire  
Burning at these mysteries... these mysteries... these mysteries  
Ah you're the mystery  
You're the mystery"

_--Switchfoot_

Ever since that first night, when Xellos had come strutting in on her sporting full battle armor, had predicated the drawbacks and the seductive wonders of a romance between them, and had indirectly admitted an emotion anathema to a mazoku's existence, bimonthly visits rapidly became monthly visits, then weekly ones.

Filia soon found she didn't even need to consciously call for the enigmatic priest-general. Simple half-attentive thoughts summoned him. Grape jam or an iris bloom that reminded her of the hue of his ungainly yet elegant hair, something that smelled spicy-sweet like him, a witty retort between two ceramics shop customers that he might employ—any casual rumination on Xellos, and there Xellos was, with a crackle or a fizzle, setting down his crimson-stoned staff, throwing his cloak over some chair, comfortable and casual as he could be, strolling round Filia's shop, poking at the wares, fixing himself some tea on her stove, casually brushing her lips or neck as he walked past. Depending on the traffic of customers—usually at inappropriate times, rather than those mindful of decorum—he might epilogue such physical touches with hands that smoothly roved to other parts of Filia's body, or he'd beckon her up the rickety wood steps to her bedroom.

Whether she flushed violently and tried to give his face a resounding smack, or vaulted into his arms in consent, was a matter of her own mood, and either seemed to satisfy him immensely. Either made him delightedly laugh.

It was as if he had always done this, as if no saturated history of animosities and scathing words had ever existed between them—like he was utterly indifferent to anything of the sort. Xellos was, of course, a creature for whom the fire and brimstone of justice, poetic vengeance, righteous loyalties, and the sort were all obsolete, or, perhaps, never significant in the first place—so it was easy for Filia to see how this new, pleasurable, convenient set-up, in which tiresome eye-scratchings between them were boring and passé, might be readily adopted by the mazoku.

And Filia admitted that she loved it too. It was easy, peaceful, reassuring, this constant, quiet, breezily smirking presence that was Xellos. He was more powerful than anyone she had ever met—more powerful than any of the other mazoku created by the five sublords of Shabranigdo, so said Lina Inverse— so, provided he felt as favorably toward her as it seemed, there was little question as to her safety from all other dangers, and, by extension, the safety of her adoptive son Val, and their fox servant, Jillas.

Though that was the odd thing. Lately, Xellos behaved in a strangely impassive, pleasant way toward the infant Val, as well—a harmless baby now, but, in a former life, Valgaav, the tortured but vicious mazoku-ancient dragon hybrid servant of the late, unlamented mazoku lord, Chaos Dragon Gaav.

Filia remained cautious when Xellos and Val mixed, despite the satisfaction of having so formidable an ally as Xellos. Her lover had once displayed keen contempt towards Valgaav, the mazoku Seigram, and all other servants of the scheming Gaav, sole child of Shabranigdo to break away from, and try to overpower, his siblings. It was eons of strife between Gaav and Hellmaster Fibrizo, another obliterated child of Shabranigdo, that had aggravated the War of the Monster's Fall.

Xellos had been, Filia grew to grudgingly admit, just another pawn in that ancient war, however mighty a pawn he was. According to Lina, he had been sent to undo threatening acts set in motion by Gaav, had been ravaged and nearly killed by Gaav himself, and had then been "loaned" to Fibrizo by his creator, Greater Beast Zelas Metallium, to execute even more orders against Gaav which were, to him, both foolish and troublesome—but beyond his power to disobey.

So Xellos was justified in his exhaustion of Fibrizo and his loathing of Gaav and servants—it was even anticipated of him. But it was Filia's duty to raise Val sheltered and nurtured, far remote from his anguished past life. She was atoning for the murder of Val's ancient dragon race by her golden dragon race. And the constant presence of Xellos, who had relentlessly hunted and nearly killed Val in a sneering frenzy when the child was still Valgaav, was not entirely conducive to this end.

And yet there Xellos stood nearly every visit, over Val's little makeshift bed, making irreverent faces and noises at him, smirking when the baby giggled. Occasionally, as if he were bored and it were an interesting new fancy, Xellos even picked the child up. He would feed Val some of the mushy oatmeal that Filia had fixed to wean him off his bottle, curiously cocking his head at the baby all the while.

Wrinkling his nose at the smell of Val's diaper and handing him back to Filia, with a chirping quip of "I think he's leaking."

Another day, coming upon Val sleeping on his stomach on the floor, plucking some of the tuftier down off of Val's expanding, growing black wings, and murmuring approval at the progress of his molting. "Fascinating how fast these things grow, isn't it, Filia?"

Still another day, sitting on Filia's porch, painting idle pictures with tongues of fire from the end of his staff as customers wafted in and out, sitting in a cross-legged yogi pose, while a tired Val, who had been watching in fascination, slept with his head plopped against one of the mazoku's knees. Not waking, or moving, the child, when Val did this.

Totally, for all Filia could see, impartial and unconcerned about Val's former identity or current presence, neither welcoming nor banishing the child's attentions. Being, if it were conceivable, _fair_ to Val.

It did not settle wholly with the dragoness, who had grown far less naïve in the past year, but she did not question the ease and lack of conflict for now. Perhaps someone as old and experienced as Xellos might see outdated grudges as too effortful, in the vast scheme of things, to maintain forever.

Days passed untroubled by eventlessness, just enlivened enough by a peppering of squabbles. Such quibbling was usually the product of Xellos's softer-edged but relentless teasing, of something naïve, obnoxious, or prudish that Filia had said or done ("Oh my heavens, Filia, I see your little white panties when your tail pops out, and you call yourself a lady!"). He apparently loved the challenge of their verbal sparring, and, though it fatigued her, something about the constancy of his pestering, followed by her superficial outrage, was oddly comforting to her as well.

But Filia was still not prepared for blast of wind, deluge, and vertigo that followed those months of repose under the eye of the storm.

It had been an open-aired spring day, warm-baked with the prologue of summer, when Filia felt that familiar mixed surge of anger and pleased anticipation that meant Xellos had arrived. She was perched on her ladder repainting the letters on her shop sign, Jillas steadying the base with each gloved paw. His feet were planted amidst an unruly outgrowth of cattails, lavender, honeysuckle, and invasive dandelions, complaining bitterly that bees were stinging his paws. Filia had left the plants untamed since Xellos's winking suggestion a couple months back that, sometimes, natural landscapes held greater beauty than a well-tended garden.

And lately, Filia sensed, the choking, fierce determination, the ceaseless popping-up, in all manner of places and circumstances, of weeds, had a kind of beauty all its own. She reckoned that Xellos was a type of weed. Xellos was a dandelion. The yellow was overrunning her garden, curling itself around her flowers, ingratiating itself everywhere imaginable, and she found it beautiful. Gods save her.

So she flushed a pale pink at the fox's whining, and hushed him. "I think Xellos just dropped in," she commented, trying to make it sound casual, but her voice trembled a bit.

Jillas loudly groaned, bleakly scratching his eyepatch. "Oi bet 'e's gone and ettin' all moy sammiches in the oice box, mistress!" he shrilled. His neckhairs bristled. "That thievin' scoundrel, no-account monstah, always had it out for Lord Valga—"

"He doesn't eat regular food, Jillas, and he doesn't do things without necessity, and I'll thank you NOT to discuss Val's previous life, when I want him freed of the burden," Filia chided. Then she added under her breath,"…though I bet Xellos IS hungry." Slight distemper at this notion filled her; it meant Xellos would be tiresome today if he needed a meal of negative sentiments, if he needed to be parasitic, if his mistress on Wolfpack Island had not recently given him any missions of trickster or mercenary nature that might fill his astral belly.

She began to descend the ladder when a clamorous crash inside her cottage caused all the birds perched on the pediment to take flight. Filia gasped, and wobbled, nearly falling on Jillas. "Oh my!" she shrieked, stumbling inside, Jillas at her heels. Her pupils dilated slowly in the dark; she had not lit candles that day, preserving the wax with the use of the streaming sunlight.

She made out a familiar tall, slender male form crouched over her potter's wheel, using it to brace himself upright, an entire shelf of pots that she had fired the day before demolished in pieces around his feet.

It was obvious that he had destroyed them on purpose.

Presently he lifted his head, opened his eyes, and twin slit amethysts stared blankly at her. His smile was tight and bland. His free arm was wrapped around his midriff, the long hem of his robe covering his midsection. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

"XELLOS!" Filia roared, tail curling and twisting behind her. She stamped her booted foot. "Couldn't you have fashioned some OTHER way to make me mad and get a meal, besides DESTROYING my merchandise and livelihood? WELL? Val has to EAT, you know! He's a growing boy!"

"Stupid monstah," Jillas muttered. "Oi has teh eat too."

The mazoku didn't respond to either of them. His expression didn't change, didn't acquire the air of malicious delight or mischief typical of relishing a feast of negativity, except for the slightest, almost relieved, loosening of his smile. He didn't straighten. In fact, his knees slightly buckled, and he sat down shakily on her wheel. Yes, he was definitely sweating, profusely. His hand shook as he covered his eyes, still open and slightly glazed.

It was then that Filia realized something was very wrong. "…Xellos?" She hastened to his side. She saw that he was hiding something. A wound. "Let me see your stomach!"

"Nah." His eyes closed behind the hand. Still the smile. His voice was hoarse, but cavalier. "That's not suitable behavior towards a lady."

She was not amused. "NOW!" She seized his arm, pried it off his middle, and cast aside his cloak. She nearly cried out in shock. For where a torso should be, a jagged hole ripped almost completely through his midriff. She could see her potter's shelf through him. Blood soaked his cream silk turtleneck, and she had to force herself to remember that it wasn't real blood, that it was just an additional ruse, an illusion, of the physical body he chose. But the hole in him was no illusion. He was deeply injured. Tears sprang to her eyes and the urge to vomit rose in her throat.

"Bloody 'ell! Gaav spare us!" Jillas backed away, rushing upstairs, presumably to hide Val and himself, thinking an imminent danger that had brutalized someone as powerful as Xellos must be approaching.

The thought had crossed Filia's mind too. A shiver wracked her vertabrae.

The mazoku managed to laugh, brittly, shaking his head and shrugging. "You should see the OTHER guy," he croaked. "Who is, incidentally, dead…so, relax." He grunted, and, with a little wave of the hand that had been covering his eyes, caused a ray of black light, and then his habitual red-tipped staff, to materialize on the ground near them.

"Xellos…" Filia stammered, seeking composure, bracing him upright. "I…Don't you think you should go to YOUR home to heal from this?"

"I've botched a mission for Beastmaster Zelas." His smile disappeared and his tone became more solid. "Was supposed to get some information out of a troublesome underling of her sister, Lord Deep Sea Dolphin…and the fellow was…ah, er…so ardent in his opposition that I had to kill him before he killed me, and, unfortunately, before I got the information. Tight-lipped little troublemaker, he was. I had Lord Dolphin's general intercede on my behalf to deliver my ah status report, but…I really don't think I'll be welcomed pleasantly at Wolfpack Island, not until Lord Beastmaster has digested the news for a day or two. No, I've come here for a spot." With a winsome gaze up at her, he leaned his forehead into her arm, like a puckish child asking for more cookies. It made Filia's heart race as he concluded, "You took care of me before when I was injured. Encore. Take me to a bed, please."

Filia nodded slowly, mustering the restraint to exercise her mental faculties, for once, before her emotions. Perhaps motherhood had exacted such gravitas on her. Maturity. "Let me get your staff so you can lean on it." She retrieved the long, twisted wooden object, its sphere beginning to glow red, like a bloody fiery womb, as if affronted by her alien touch. Indeed, the wood burned a little in her fingers, as it had the last time she had held it—the last time Xellos had underestimated an opponent, Valgaav, and fallen under her care—until she handed it to him, and it immediately ceased its smoldering.

Xellos nodded, driving the end firmly into the tile floor of the cottage. "Thank you, Filia." He stood, steadying himself, and began, with the dragoness's aid, to trudge toward a spare cot under a window that Filia always kept in the back of her pottery room.

Filia was astounded that, despite being soaked in a very convincing illusion of sweat, Xellos still smelled like fresh summer and spicy-sweetness. Like, as she had mused earlier, dandelions, like freshly rained-upon earth, a pinch of playful pure vanilla overlaid with dark, intoxicating incense and musk. How did he manage to be so alluring, even now?

He was incredible.

He was her rite of passage into something other than wide-eyed and simple childhood, into a recognition of grays, middle-grounds, and multivalence. He was her doorway. Her state of limbo.

And suddenly, walking alongside this strange and beautiful creature formed from darkness, Filia felt the urge to cry again—not in disgust, or worry, or rage, but in gratitude, and in celebration of her own metamorphosis because of this unlikely catalyst that was Xellos the mazoku. She was almost religiously transported by this epiphany and she wished she could embrace him.

He seemed to sense some sort of powerful feeling in her—a mixed feeling, a bittersweet one—it first made him cringe, and then impishly, mysteriously, smile. "Sweet, cathartic Filia," he chuckled, as they reached the bed, his eyes closed, his voice breathy, wry, even a little dismaying for her. "Always so passionate, heh. So delightfully predictable."

Her cheeks lit on fire. "I'm sorry, my mind wandered…"

"Evidently," he croaked, slowly lying back on the bed.

"…Actually…I was thinking that I was …really quite glad for your presence…even though you drive me mad sometimes." Her voice was barely above a whisper.

"…Really. Maybe you're NOT so predictable." Xellos's smile became that of the cat devouring the canary, and he opened his eyes, and began to elaborate.

But then abruptly he jerked, arched his back, and yelped. More pointless sweat, pointless because she knew what he really was, but out of the habit of deceptive appearance, beaded his forehead and shirt. He gritted his teeth. "Ahhhh, damn. Enough small talk, I am afraid. This needs fixing rather quickly, if you please."

This time Filia did not stop and think. Every cell in her screamed with empathy and pathos. "I don't have the skills to heal you fully, but-but Milgasia, m-my hermit elder in the Kataa Mountains, he can heal you! I will call and persuade him! I will! It may take an hour or so though…so if pain can sustain you for that time, then…then _here_!"

She ran, seized a shard of shattered ceramic, and made the tiniest of cuts across her palm. Real red blood, not his fake blood, but her own real sacrifice, so noble to her in that moment of mental unclarity, bloomed out and trickled down the spaces between her fingers. She showed it to him, eagerly. "Here, it _hurts_, do you feel it? Do you feel better?"

Xellos had gone very quiet when Filia had begun babbling of her plans to heal him. Now, like a striking snake, he came to life through his weakness and seized the wrist of her injured hand in his own gloved fist, so tightly that she winced.

"_FILIA. Don't_."

His voice was unexpectedly loud and severe and his face was stormy. Just as she always felt the need to call on her thoughts in his presence, so too did it seem she inspired emotional demonstration in him. But she didn't know why, at the moment. He should be pleased by her actions.

She started to cry, hard, a flood, at his displeasure. She sank to her knees, her wrist still in his grasp.

"_Look_ at me," Xellos snapped. "Silly creature, I said LOOK at me." He waited until she obeyed, and then, in a voice that was far more level, but somehow still sharp, he mandated, "If you do that sort of thing when I am around, then what I have done, and _plan _to do, for you, at my _own_ cost, is _pointless. _And Filia, I don't like to do pointless things_. Filia_! Stop crying and _listen_. If you _ever _do something like this again," and he shook her by the wrist, just slightly, to indicate what manner of self-harmful action he meant, "then I will LEAVE you for GOOD." His eyes blazed ruby with that stern promise.

He did not look at the small spattering of her blood that he had caused, by shaking her wrist, on the floor.

Did not acknowledge it, even once.

"_Dragon._ Are you _listening_ to me?"

Filia's head spun with confusion. Surely there could be nothing that a creature whose sole purpose was selfish pleasure, destruction, and chaos, would love more than to see a willing victim suffering on its behalf. It was just a little cut, a tide-over! She had never intended to offer great agony for him—gods, or _had_ she? And if he was telling her NOT to, did this mean he was doing something…

Protective?

Selfless?

Was that conceivable of his race? She had been taught otherwise. Yet…

"Filia," Xellos was lying down again, his breathing ragged, his hands clutching the sides of the cot and his limbs trembling. Still, he summoned patiently instructive tones now. "Go bandage your hand and call Milgasia. I can wait an hour."

The hour passed quickly enough. Filia hovered constantly over Xellos's cot wringing her hands while he writhed, twisted, and grit his teeth. She left him only to bandage her palm, summon Milgasia, calm Jillas down, and check on the still-sleeping Val.

Milgasia arrived without fanfare, simply striding through the front door, clad in all white robes reminiscent of the garb of a Hindu ascetic.

His mid-back-length mop of hair was a deeper burnished gold than Filia's, a sign of far greater maturity—such maturity, in fact, that he was a century or so older than Xellos. His skin was a hue of fair cinnamon and his eyes were a shrewd canary yellow, and as he knelt by Xellos's bedside, he riveted them on the form of the agonized murderer of his kinsmen with a regal, analytical sort of coldness. "Daughter of Bazar Ul Copt, what do you mean me to do by sparing this monster's life?" His voice was like wind rustling the leaves of a late august tree. He was most intimidating, in a quiet sort of way. "Your father would weep to see this day."

"Why, hello to you _too_, Milgasia," Xellos scoffed through gritted teeth, burning amethyst eyes open and glaring. He made no effort to veil his biting condescendence toward his old enemy. "DO keep insulting your protégé, you haven't cast shame on the names of five generations of her forefathers yet. I mean _look_ at her, she's still got the dignity to stare you in the eye." Then the mazoku paused to curl into a ball as a fresh wave of pain washed over him. "Ow, _triple-shit_," he grunted, breaching his habitual politeness to spit a profanity. Then he fell silent.

This cessation of baiting and insults was perhaps fortunate, for Milgasia's expression of icy contempt had grown to a point where he appeared ready to stand, refuse aid, and glide out of Filia's cottage. "Don't pretend to feel indignation on Filia's behalf, creature of chaos. Surely you must be getting a square meal out of all of her discomfort."

Filia shifted weight, hiding her bandaged hand, suddenly, with deep shame. No, that had not been the case. After all her derision of Xellos, he had not fed on her like some gleeful tick, not this time. Embarrassment and indignation swirled inside her tight stomach.

"My, my, dragons certainly do a lot of unnecessary gabbing, don't they?" Xellos shakily scoffed.

His eyes drifted towards Filia, witnessing her humiliation, then snapped electrically back on Milgasia.

They were a hotter color, suddenly.

He continued, "And yet, little thinking, and even LESS knowledge, accompanies your endless verbiage. You know _nothing _about my…regards…towards Filia. Now, my dear ignorant lizard, have you come here to scathe Filia over romantic relationships that she has every personal freedom to orchestrate, and to laugh as I die, or have you come here to fulfill her request that you heal me?" He smiled demeaningly up at his sole savior, cocking his head to one side against his pillow, as if genuinely curious about Milgasia's answer.

No one could accuse Xellos of lacking brass balls.

Milgasia continued to stare at the infamous mazoku down the end of his long, straight nose. His skin looked a little grayer for a moment. He drew a deep breath, demonstrating remarkable restraint, and, once again, addressed Filia. "Romantic relations? With _this_ thing? Filia…as if an _alliance_ with him _alone_ were not enough!"

Filia didn't confront the charge. "Please just take care of him, Milgasia," she bleated.

"That is _really_ what you desire? Or has he threatened you otherwise?"

"Xellos has not made a single threat against me. It is complicated, Milgasia."

"As are all things of substance," Xellos murmured. "Purity is overrated."

"As are _you,_" Milgasia retorted, a bit more viciously. He shot to his feet. "Filia, you will regret sparing him. _Let him die_. You will thank me, someday in the future."

"Milgasia, NO, please!" Filia seized the hem of his robes and fell nearly prostrate before him. "PLEASE! You CAN'T!" She thought on Val's words, his words of bottomless sorrow, and exasperation, and lamentation, when he had been Valgaav, words which carried a grain of painful truth, and she added, "SOMEONE must cause this endless swinging of pendulums, this…back-and-forth warfare between gods and monsters, to END! We have ALREADY faced near destruction at the hands of a maoh from another universe because of this _idiotic fighting_!"

Behind them, Xellos made a surprised and appraising sound in his throat at her proclamation, but said nothing.

"And is that why you let him into your bed? Sweet, naïve child. Don't fear, Filia." Milgasia assumed a paternal, reassuring air. He touched the crown of his subordinate's head. "This thing of darkness will not harm either of us right now. He is too weak, and anyway, he wants to lull you into a state of trust. He won't do butchering in front of you, not now. He knows how it would upset you."

Now Xellos snorted. "You overestimate _my_ generosity, and you _under_estimate Filia's strength. If I felt the need to kill the only person who, at the moment, can mend me, heh, you would have been eliminated by the instant you showed up at my bedside. When have I ever been anything but pragmatic and efficient, Milgasia?" The mazoku priest-general stretched a long, sinuous arm up behind his violet head, gingerly, but effecting that cavalier quality for which he was eternally infamous. "And anyway, Filia can handle a _great_ deal. This I know. It is one of the most fascinating things about her. I cannot help admiring it." He snickered. "I'm somewhat _amazed_ that _you _have overlooked such an asset as she. More proof of the foolishness of her elders and her gods."

Filia felt her cheeks growing hot. She clutched tighter to the foot of Milgasia's robes. She had never known Xellos _admired_ her, in that strange manner of his. Admiration required, in a way, more sacrifices, more serious commitment, than mere attraction alone—more, even, than _love _alone. It threw still more kinks into the clockwork of this moment.

"You see how he baits and then lures, Filia?" Milgasia rumbled, his eyes having become burnished ore at Xellos's expert jibes. "How he seeks to divide and conquer? Let him _die_, I tell you. His words are empty!"

"For 'empty' words, they sure irritate the hell out of _you_," Xellos sneered. The air around him seemed to darken with hatred.

"_PLEASE STOP_!" Filia screamed. "_Please, ENOUGH_!" She felt like such a child, such a foolish, helpless child—for all her growing, all her weathering, over the last few years' events. Like a foolish child vainly begging her ancient, viciously quarreling parents to kiss and make up, rather than, simply, a grown woman persuasively seeking aid on behalf of the man she loved.

The man she loved. The monster. But the title felt contrived.

"You had better think twice about renewing animosities with _me_, Milgasia," Xellos hissed calmly through Filia's hysterics, still smiling. "Or pray to your Fire Dragon King that I don't somehow survive."

Filia began to whimper. She had never felt such urgency, or rage, and not known to whom she should direct it. "Please, _please_," she whispered, to no one in particular.

"A useless prayer," Xellos added, and Filia froze, and quieted, as she felt silk against her cheek, as a gloved hand, Xellos's, calmly brushed it, "because I now have more than one reason to survive. Whether you believe me is your _mortally_ imperative choice, Milgasia. Heh."

"I think I can chance it," the dragon elder replied frostily. Smiling, as well. "I would chance anything to see an abomination such as you wiped off this world for good. A golden opportunity."

Xellos laughed. It was a hollow sound, spawning goosebumps on Filia's forearms and thighs. Yet still he stroked her cheek with his index and middle finger, so tenderly, just barely reaching her, attending calmly to the bursting emotionality that was so central to her, and so alien to him. He seemed to cherish it, somehow. "It's alright, Filia, get up. Don't beg to him on my account. He is undeserving, this witless wonder. But I'll find another way to fix myself."

"I won't let you die!" Filia protested. She grabbed the hand that touched her, crushed it in her grasp—exposing her bandaged palm in the process. "_I'll try anything_!" She was horrified at her own words, but they came as naturally as breathing.

"I won't let you cut yourself again for my sake," the "abomination" crooned. He ran his thumb across the back of her bandaged hand. "My silly dragoness. I won't take the unnecessary risk. Remember how I hate those?"

Milgasia froze in his path out the door, and turned. His expression had changed considerably. He thundered to Filia's side, and seized her wounded hand. He stared at the bloodied bandage for an eternal stretch. "Gods. _Filia_."

"Forgive me, Milgasia," Filia sobbed. "It was stupid, so very stupid, and I _won't_ do it again.."

He didn't seem to hear her; he was glaring with all his might at Xellos. "…You refused to accept the…gift…of her pain, even at your _own_ detriment?"

"It appears that way, doesn't it?" Xellos congenially smiled. His eyes closed.

Migasia's eyes, in turn, narrowed. "That is an awfully idyllic proclamation."

"Perhaps, but you can't prove that I _don't_ care for her, _can_ you? You cannot prove that the impossible _never_ becomes probable."

"…No. I cannot. Very well, Xellos. I'll heal you. I will act on faith, and not reason, just this once. Filia, I hope you and I do not live to regret this day."

"We _won't_," Filia pledged, determined to believe it.

Milgasia stonily laid his hands on Xellos's midriff. The mazoku gazed levelly up at him, but his hands clawed at the bedsheets in anticipation of an excruciating process.

"Only white magic can be used to cast healing spells. It is my understanding that this much white magic may kill you, dark creature," Milgasia remarked, as warm orbs of light collected in his palms. His face was kinder now.

"Not if you go _slowly_," Xellos pointedly trilled back. Already his muscles were tightening, despite his composure. "Ah, the bitter taste of tonic."

"Very well. Brace yourself, then."

Xellos closed his eyes. His nearest hand slid, just barely, against Filia's bandaged palm, as though instinctually seeking some negative energies with which to counter the white magic, in her pain. But, just as he had earlier, he withdrew from the temptation at the last instant, leaving her untapped.

Her eyes filled again with tears. She squeezed her mazoku's shoulder, tightly, with her good hand.

He turned and faced the wall as Milgasia's healing magic reached its crescendo. Abruptly, almost savagely, he cried out, and it chilled Filia, because Xellos never demonstrated such uncompromising agony. He struggled viciously, for a moment, against Milgasia's painfully mending grasp, then remembered himself, collapsing back against the bed. He seemed to howl just like one of his creator's rugged northern wolves, as Milgasia began to pull back, and to dim the light of the healing spell.

Feeling sorrow as she had never felt before, Filia seized Xellos's tousled, spasming violet head in her arms and held tight. The gesture, and perhaps her anguish for him, had an almost mesmerizing effect; he shuddered, went limp, and seemed to fall asleep in her arms.

Milgasia drew away from the couple, and stood. "That is as much as I dare do. More might do a mazoku harm rather than good—but at least he is on the mend now." He drew a handkerchief from his robes, dabbing his forehead like some heroic physician. "I have never had to draw on so much power to heal before….the astral body is far more complicated to heal than the physical body. See to it that he is not moved for a week. And Filia. Be careful."

"_You_ be careful, savior of demons," Xellos croaked, apparently as alert as ever through his bedraggled and suffering state. He mustered a grin, even a brittle chuckle. "I pay back debts, Milgasia. I owe one to the Dragon Aqualord to this day, and plan on paying it somehow. If you should wish to accept a favor from a mazoku, I will do you one…"

"Just treat her with respect and dignity, dark one," Milgasia severely retorted, nodding sharply at Filia. "Deserve her. That, I think, is more favor than you can handle, in and of itself."

Xellos opened his eyes, and said nothing. The very oxygen in the room seemed to crackle with intensity. "Mm," the priest-general finally replied, and no more.

"…Milgasia. I thank you." Filia rested her forehead against that of her universally unlikely lover. "You will see that there is a reason behind all this."

"I pray earnestly that you are right, daughter of Bazar Ul Copt," her elder replied, before teleporting to remote lands, and leaving the dragoness to her doubts.


	3. Yin and Yang

Limbo

(Another Slayers Try Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia)

By Amber S./"AmberPalette"

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

**Chapter Three: Yin and Yang**

_"Wanna get myself back in again_

_The salt of oblivion_

_I wanna taste the salt of your skin_

_The salt of oblivion"_

_--Third Eye Blind_

"_I have traveled the paths of desire  
gathering flowers and carrying fire  
Raising a grave to the reasons behind me  
Looking for strength as you live to remind me  
I'm drawn to you  
I'm caught in you  
I am the fly who dreams of the spider  
The path to the web becomes deeper and wider  
I dream of the silk that is tangled inside you  
And know that I want to be somewhere beside you  
I'm drawn to you  
I'm caught in you  
In your eyes  
All of the promises  
All the lies  
Will you keep all the promises  
In your eyes?  
I am crossing the bridges of sorrow  
Empty with yearning and full of tomorrow  
The river is high and the bridges are burning  
I know I've been hurt but I keep on returning_  
_I'm drawn to you  
I'm caught in you  
In your eyes  
All of the promises_  
_All the lies  
Will you keep all of the promises  
In your eyes?  
I have traveled the paths of desire  
following smoke and remembering fire  
The night is falling, the path is receding  
I don't need to see it to know where it's leading  
In your eyes  
All of the promises  
All the lies  
Will you keep all of the promises  
In your eyes?"_

_--October Project_

…_She was swimming perpetually downward in a molasses-thick black sea…swimming after a faint ghost of a man, unconscious, his hair the hue of violets…she couldn't reach him, couldn't catch him, and he was drowning…and he was bleeding…_

…_the purple-haired man came to life, eyes open, glowing, the void around them warming and brightening with the light of his gaze…_

…_Val was there in the thick black waters too, wriggling around, confused and afraid…and so was the signpost of her mace and ceramics shop…the man with purple hair seized the infant and the signpost in each hand, and beckoned to her to follow him…_

…_not up to the light, but downward…_

…_She shook her head no, no, not down to the blackness, what might be down there?…._

…_No…I am not like you, it will suffocate me…_

…_.I said no…I will not trust you with my child and my livelihood and my home….not you…._

…_dragon killer…_

…_NO, you are still bleeding, let me help you to swim UP, to the light!….let me heal you…_

…_.NO, I said NO, I won't follow you…._

…_but I love you…_

…_I don't trust you!…._

…_Xellos, you're drowning!…._

Filia jerked awake at Xellos's bedside. She gasped and gulped, and then seized the back of her neck, painfully stiff from slouching forward dozing on a stool.

"Heh. Morning, sunshine." Her mazoku lover, the perishing subject of her nightmare, shifted in his cot and cupped her chin in his now gloveless hand. "You were having a doozy of a dream, I think. There you go. Better?"

The support certainly did give her cricked neck a bit of respite. Filia sighed wearily. "Thanks." Her robin's egg blue eyes shifted towards the window. It was still dark. "I should probably go check on Val." The infant's role in her nightmare caused her a residual shudder.

She stood hastily, before the mildly inquisitive gaze on Xellos's face might give way to interrogation, and shook off her pale wool robes free of clay dust. "Would you like anything? Water? Another change of bandages?"

"Just your company," he purred, with that maddeningly veiled little smile. "Bring him down with you."

"I…alright," Filia stuttered, briskly making way for the stairs to her bedroom and Val's crib. She felt her tail pursuing her, dragging along the ground, and her cheeks flamed at her own predictability.

Val, who suffered from terrible colic most nights, was, tonight, sound asleep…it was a peculiar thing, but ever since Xellos had begun to make regular visits to her cottage, the child had seemed generally more secure, more content. Filia wasn't sure why a mazoku's presence wasn't quite so disturbing to an ancient dragon as to a golden dragon; or perhaps Val's green intuition simply picked up on a lack of malevolent intent on Xellos's part these days. She certainly hoped so, as she hoisted the growing child into her arms, as the baby nestled his tufty aqua green head against her neck.

After a moment of hesitation, realizing they would never be out of her sight, Filia placed Val on Xellos's chest so that she could heat the baby's bottle over the fire. The mazoku opened an eye and peered down at his new companion. "Good evening, Val," he muttered in a tone of amiable curiosity, grinning crookedly. "Mommy's tending to us both, yes?"

"Gah...foo'!" the one-year-old proclaimed emphatically, pushing himself up to sitting, his little toes and fingers curling in delight at his weird purple haired playmate. His tiny black tail all but wagged at the mazoku.

"I don't know if you just called me 'food' or 'fool,' " Xellos chuckled, cocking an eyebrow.

Val giggled, relishing this game of flirtatious sparring.

Filia forced herself not to react with the overflowing motherly fuzziness which felt so appropriate to the interaction of her lover and adoptive child. She forced herself to remember her fundamental mistrust of Xellos—at least, she thought it could be called something as strong as mistrust—as she took her post on the rickety stool and collected the hungry baby into her arms.

"Aw, he likes the mush better than that hot milk stuff," Xellos protested.

"Would you like to feed him?" Filia snapped, a bit of sarcasm emerging in her voice. "Since you're an expert at childcare—just like you are at not overestimating your opponent and getting mortally wounded?"

"Oh, _what_ever." The mazoku fell silent, his expression a tad pouty. "Know-it-all," he added a moment later, now notably petulant.

The dragoness smiled triumphantly and proceeded to nurture her little one. Val suckled robustly, and the moments passed otherwise quietly and calmly. Filia nearly nodded off while feeding the child, prevented from doing so by tactful coughs on Xellos's part. She almost thanked him. Almost.

The mazoku watched the infant, now, with closed eyes. A predator deciding whether the quarry was worth it. As ever these days, he seemed to think it was not—seemed to even express a distant sort of sympathy for Val—gently smiling, losing interest, and turning toward the ceiling. "He is really like a son to you."

"…Yes."

The smile curled up higher. "I've noticed. I should imagine your elders would approve of your maternal sacrifices." Then the mazoku's brow marred, as with a strange recognition that something inside him was not right. As though recollecting something troubling, but only murkily. "…Hm."

Xellos "noticed" everything. Filia would always wonder how he could manage to observe, know, and absorb so much more with closed eyes than most creatures could ever dream to know with eyes wide open. Xellos grasped the betrayal of images, she supposed. The betrayal of what appears to be obvious. The lie of "what you see is what you get." Perhaps for that reason he found common eyesight useless to his purposes.

She was noticing tings a lot more too, lately. It was why she was puzzled, now, by the bewilderment crossing Xellos's features for a fleeting instant, before his enigmatic smile returned.

What, of the topic, of mothers and sacrifices, and hybrids reborn anew, bothered him so much that there would be a surface ripple of his deepest-guarded thoughts?

"We could never have our own children, you know," he remarked, a pensive mumble, scratching his cheek.

Filia jolted. The entire room became blazingly hot to her. And oxygen deprived; her head reeled. "Wh-what, _children_? WHAT?" They had hardly been together, a steady pair of lovers, for the scant side of a year—and considering the fact that both their expected lifetimes spanned millennia…

Xellos smiled mildly, one eye peeking open. "Oh, heh, I'm sorry, but you see, I was trying to anticipate the natural course of your sentiments, as a physical, warm-blooded woman deeply attached to one man. That is, me." He placed his hand on his chest. "Let me tell you a little secret. People always say that I lie, they rant and rave about my deceits. Actually, though? I tell the truth_, leaving out_ portions as I see fit, revealing what I have omitted in due course. But I won't do that to you this time. Not to you." His lip quirked more impishly. "That is, if creatures related to snakes and lizards _are_ warm-blooded…"

"Don't be impertinent," she snapped, struggling between overwhelming sensations of flattery and outrage, as Val yawned and wriggled about in her arms.

"Impertinent is my middle name…"

"No it's not. You don't _have _a middle name," she rebutted, a somewhat infantile ring of "a-HA" in her words.

"Okay, so _ANYway_," Xellos redirected, "the fact of the matter, Filia, is that our children would be put on the draft of Beastmaster Zelas's army of mazoku once they came of age. It would only be a matter of time. I will tell you this only once, Filia. Because it is _you_ I am telling."

"…Xellos…"

"There will be many times when I'll think of tidbits like this, solely for your sake. That's enough risk for me in and of itself. So. If you choose to ignore me…I won't tell you again." He stretched. "I'm tired, darling. Goodnight." And with that, Xellos either simulated for himself, or uncannily imitated, deep slumber. He even snored.

An hour passed before dawn, when Filia decided her lover had tired of her company and would behave himself. She stood, stretched while holding the drowsy Val, and carried the child back upstairs. She passed Jillas's room and heard the telltale sounds that he had wakened and was washing up. She strode down the steps and put the teakettle on, preparing breakfast.

Suddenly the fire in the hearth died.

The kettle stopped bubbling. The bacon stopped sizzling. The room temperature dropped a good thirty degrees. Filia hugged herself and went rigid in place—she did not know how she knew, but she was sure something was wrong. An overwhelming aura of malevolence, despair, and dread spread through the house like black ink on wet white cotton fabric.

Someone very evil had entered the cottage.

Filia was so overpowered by it that she could not move for a good five seconds. Her first thoughts went to Val, and to calling for Xellos to offer whatever help he might manage in his wounded state—as a flick of his wrist was more powerful than all her magic summoned at once.

She whirled on her heel to beeline for the stairs…

…And came face to face with the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.

The lady before her stood a good six feet, four inches tall, a colossus of a woman, with long, lean, but big-boned limbs. She was not human—her ears were sharply pointed, even more so than Filia's. She was dressed in a fluid white Greek toga that clung to her generously curved form like wet silk, and every wrist and ankle jangled with endless, blinding gold bracelets. Her hair was a waterfall of loose, silver-lavender curls, in no way teased or tied back, covering one of two enormous and feral eyes. When she leered towards Filia, the other eye was visible—one a deep purple-blue, the other burnished gold. And both eyes had pupils with distinctly reptilian slits.

A mazoku.

"Good morning," the woman spoke, and it was arresting, the power—a husky contralto. Almost like the growl of a wolf…but so alluring in its menace.

And Filia knew her at once. "You're Zelas Metallium."

"…Correct. Not as stupid as you look, little one."

_Little one?!_ Filia actually managed to be furious in front of this child of Shabranigdo, and "mother" of her wounded lover. "Would you mind explaining your presence?"

"I've come to claim what's mine." The woman drew a cigarette, perched in a slender black holder, and dragged luxuriously on it. She filled the room with its noxious fumes as she exhaled.

Up in the bedroom, Val coughed.

Greater Beast Zelas Metallium's eyes wandered hungrily toward that distressed infant sound.

Filia dashed to the bottom of the stairwell and stood in front of it, ready to die keeping the enormous mazoku lord from ascending a single step.

"Relax," the monster queen crooned. "I have no need of a snot nosed ancient dragon. Of any dragon, really. Your kind has well passed its point of threat. Or so I thought, until I was informed that you're holding my most precious underling hostage here, so that he might linger indefinitely unable to heal himself."

"I beg your pardon?" Filia's throat felt like it was closing from the fumes and from the fear she didn't care to admit she was feeling, but she still managed to rebuke the intruder. "Xellos CHOSE to convalesce here, I'm not holding him hostage! He expressed FEAR of YOU."

"There was no need for XELLOS to fear me," Zelas rumbled, taking a seat on the potter's wheel. "I know my child's errors were due to his distractions." Her snakelike eyes fell on Filia. "His somewhat adolescent romantic distractions. With you." She laughed, if the sound of gravel against metal could be called laughter. "And you think you're really healing him, don't you?"

Filia's confusion must have been visible, because it only made the great woman sprawled like a lazy predator across her potter's wheel smirk all the more.

"What I mean, little dragon egg, is that he has gotten some silly new fancy—comes from boredom, I'm sure, when you surf the sea of chaos for more than a millennium, you start to need new stimulation, new amusement—that he should care for you like some sort of boyfriend or, dare I say it, husband…" She blew smoke directly in Filia's face, pausing theatrically to watch the dragoness hack and spew, smiling derisively. In the closeness of their faces, though her eyes stung and watered, Filia made out the wrinkles of a more ancient face than was at first apparent in Zelas's flawless visage—strategically hidden beneath streaks of blue and orange warpaint in the shape of clawmarks.

"What of it?" the dragoness managed to cough, if only to end the unbearable sensation of being wriggling, helpless prey pinioned under some silently gloating tigress or she-wolf's paw.

"Well. Not to upset your delicate internal balance, darling…" Another puff on the endless cigarette. "…but he could be here for weeks lingering in a state of semi-ailment. Because, you see, he appears unwilling to feed from your negative energies—of which there are, my sanctimonious little egg, actually plenty—in order to heal as a mazoku properly should. And that is why I've come to collect him. The errands he needs to run are piling up at home, and the distraction known as Filia Ul Copt must either be brushed aside or eliminated." Here the she-monster tapped extraordinarily long red claw-nails together, impassively. She sat upright.

"Xellos won't want me killed." Filia wasn't sure she believed her own words. "And he won't want to go home right now. If he is so precious to you…"

"Don't lecture me, egg. I was around when your grandfathers ten generations back were still in incubators. For that matter, my Xellos is older than your father. Have you ever considered how young and foolish you must seem to him? How, heh, inexperienced?"

"Wh…why don't you leave Xellos's preferences to Xellos?" Damn, Filia felt her voice beginning to shake. The awful desire to weep, or lie down and simply not give up, was crushing her, and she was sure it was the feast of negative energies settled in the belly of this vile goddess of mazoku.

"Why don't you be a good little dragon and go back to hating my son as is custom?"

"Who DECIDES custom?"

The she-monster guffawed, standing, and pacing around Filia in a circle. "I fail to see how that is relevant."

"Of course you do," Filia snapped, "because you don't WANT things to change!"

"Not a one of us has a choice in our nature, Miss Ul Copt." Zelas picked up Filia's tail, hoisted it into her arms, and began to prick at it with little needle-point jolts of pain, using the tips of her red nails. "Not a one of us. Leave Xellos to his ways and return to your life of solitude. It is not that I will actively oppose you if you do not. No, I'm too busy for that, and I won't fritter my precious little amount of mobility in this non-astral world to foil your petty romantic dithering. After all…you will do all the destroying and rending apart of this relationship by yourself. I've already ascertained that."

Filia whimpered. The pain Zelas was causing her appendage was accumulating into an unbearable ebb and flow of soft torment. And her words of sly, honey-dipped detriment were beginning to gorge Filia's doubts. "Please leave." Now the dragon priestess was begging.

"My Mistress." A velvet voice behind them made both women turn. It was Xellos.

Barefoot, bent down on one knee, clad only in his cream undershirt and baggy black pants, shaking from the effort of rising from bed, a sickly yellow-white hue in his skin….but Xellos, interceding, nonetheless. "I did not expect to be honored with your presence, Beastmaster." His smile appeared remarkably congenial, flattering, unconcerned with the pain that Filia was certain he was feeling for this physical exertion.

She had never felt such hatred as she now felt toward Zelas Metallium. Both monsters shuddered with the sensation of it coursing from Filia…Zelas with an almost erotic pleasure, and Xellos with an ambivalence and pensiveness. At last he seemed to dine on a small portion of the negative force, and for that Filia was almost relieved. She had taken Zelas's words to heart and was desperately worried for him.

"My pet, my darling child," Zelas cooed, lunging towards Xellos, and proffering a hand.

Xellos kissed it at once, faltering a bit, almost tipping over.

Filia gasped and made a motion towards him, but he lifted a hand, unseen by Zelas, sharply in warning. Never looking at her, never favoring her with the smallest of acknowledgment otherwise.

The dragoness held back. Some essential part of her screamed silently that her nightmare had been wrong, and that she MUST trust Xellos now—not only for her sake, but for Val's.

After all, ANYONE was better than this great wicked female.

"Are you alright?" Zelas admonished. "My dear fool, why entrust yourself to an inferior's care?"

"Filia is a fun new toy, Lord Beastmaster. It makes me happy to be around her when I am ill." How effortlessly he lied.

At least Filia hoped it was a lie.

Zelas heartily cackled, throwing back her great lavender mane. "I see! I should have realized, shouldn't I? Always one needing new intellectual pursuits, are we? Does the toy amuse you, then, my precious one?"

"Very much so, Mistress."

"Would you like to stay here and play with your toy a bit longer, till you are better?"

"If it pleases my lady." That ingratiating little smile never left. But for some reason, Xellos never once opened his eyes. Xellos opened his eyes for two reasons known to Filia—to express a rare burst of powerful emotion, usually the rage of the general side of his nature as opposed to the calm of his priest side…or to tell a complete truth. Neither appeared to be occurring now.

So Xellos was being emotionless and evasive with his mistress. This was probably to Filia's advantage. Gods, she hoped so.

"You know I cannot tell my legendary _dragon killer_ 'no,' " Zelas purred, petting her "son's" silky violet head. She smiled sinisterly at Filia, possessively, while doing so. "Play with your Filia a while longer. Go on and tarry. I shall wait another few weeks. After all, you must be rewarded for your commendable performance in the Anti-Darkstar Campaign."

Filia was sure that Zelas chose the slaying of golden dragons, among her servant Xellos's innumerable military campaigns, specifically to rub salt in Filia's wounds. She refused to allow herself to run awash with more hatred, if only to not allow Zelas more nourishment.

"I am eternally grateful, Mistress," Xellos groveled, touching his forehead to the ground. His limbs tremored still more. "For my toy."

Filia could almost feel his physical agony. It mingled with her own emotional agony. _Toy?_ Was she really? She could not tell if it was a ruse.

Zelas looked up at the dragoness, cocked an eyebrow much like her favorite priest-general creation might, in a conceding but not fully surrendering fashion. And then, in a burst of black electrical current, and the sound of a desolate wolf howl, she vanished.

Filia was at Xellos's side in an instant. "Let me help you—straighten slowly!"

He batted her hand away, uncurling inch by inch. "_Don't_. I'm fine."

"Oh, I see, a 'toy' isn't qualified to assist a mighty mazoku…" She scrambled to her feet, hugging herself, and stumbled back to the hearth to relight the fire.

"Filia, if you finish that sentence, I'll think less of you." Xellos's voice was quiet and cross, but even more than these, it was weary. There was almost—ALMOST—a distant sadness in it. A resignation.

"WHAT?"

"I dragged myself out of bed to keep you from being devoured by Beastmaster Zelas and you somehow surmise, from that, that I could actually MEAN those remarks that you're merely my toy?" Xellos scoffed, slowly pushing himself upright against a wall. He rolled his eyes. "You really ARE naïve, dear. The strategy that I just employed is commonly known as 'picking one's battles.'"

"_Don't call me naïve_! I'm not some dumb little girl!" All at once the vicious despair that followed Zelas like a garment of smoke-rings crashed fully down on Filia, and she covered her mouth to muffle a torrent of sobs while still nursing the teakettle and the stewpot with the ladel in her other hand. "I'm not a child to you! I'm NOT!" When the fire continued to fizzle out, she let out a frustrated shriek, and a blast of fire shot from her mouth, engulfing the entire hearth in an inferno. She could not see past her maelstrom of tears, and so she burned her finger.

The pain must have been enough to give Xellos the energy to cross the room. Suddenly his chin plopped heavily on her shoulder, and he leaned bodily into her from behind. "I know that. Filia, shut up." He said it like he was commenting about the weather. "Look, here is the fact of the matter: You are very precious to me. I do all I can to convey this, within my own capacity. What YOU must do is somehow cultivate receptiveness to that truth. For all my volumes of astral power, I can in no way do that FOR you. It's YOUR choice to make. Now please…help me back to bed."

The world stopped for an instant. Then it all tilted and went fuzzy for a bit…and finally things returned to their clarity and their place.

Filia dared to lean her face against that of her beloved mazoku.

He let it stay there. She felt his cheeks swelling up and back, his dimples forming against the side of her face in a sly smile, but he made no further comment. Xellos was, really, astoundingly patient.

Filia wanted to feel a pulse in Xellos's temple, a sign of life like her own, a sign of a heart, against her skin. She didn't. Not yet. She tried not to let it disquiet her too much.

"I'll take you back to bed, Xe..my Xellos…" She turned around and received him, their nooks, crannies, and protrusions fitting with astonishing neatness into each other.

"Yours, eh?" His voice was pleasantly hoarse. He nestled, with a breathy chuckle.

"Be quiet," she grumbled, hot-cheeked, as, sandwiched together, they slowly made their way to the back of the shop.

A week passed unpunctuated by any contradictions to Xellos's calm proclamation of a love that was more than superficial and idle amusement. Filia did not challenge it again herself, in this period. She was too afraid of losing the startling happiness that came of her serendipity that he, apparently, cared so deeply.

One night, a Sunday, Xellos was well enough to rise from his cot and sit outside on the porch overlooking the forest, propped up on his red-tipped staff. He was strangely distant: He told Filia he had experienced a troubling dream and wanted to think on it, to dissect it and analyze it, by himself. His eyes were firmly closed.

The news chilled her. Her own nightmare of sinking to dark places, of trust tested and failed, had never left her. And she had not known, till that moment, that mazoku could dream, or really feel fear—even for themselves, as their ultimate goal was, allegedly, the destruction of all things. What was he protecting, the loss of which might so terrify him?

She asked him this, point-blank. Xellos's lips twitched. He traced patterns on the wood porch floor with his staff. "If you want the truth, I am not even sure myself. Now. This discussion is over, Filia."

After having a minor fit—which involved kicking over two plaster-holding buckets and flinging a bag of clay over Xellos's head—Filia stormed upstairs to bed by herself, tucked in Val, slipped on a nightgown, and drifted off to sleep.

She wasn't out for very long. A movement in the dark. A warmth around her like no other, a tickling shivering warmth, on her skin's surface, simultaneously in the deepest secret recesses of her. She felt like giggling and crying out all at once, in delight, in an utmost feeling of security, and yet slightly overwhelmed with something sharper. Soft, firm hands slid around her waist and the contours of another's body fit comfortably and naturally against hers like a matching puzzle piece. Silken hair smelling of incense, vanilla, and rain brushed against her nose.

Filia first emitted a bleating, weeping sound into the dark space of her bedroom. Then, when hot, moist lips defied that sad sound, dropping feathery kisses on her closed eyelids, she wriggled over on her side and broke into a chuckle.

Then, she loudly sneezed.

The formidable mazoku snuggling against her yanked away, letting out an exaggerated "_Hah_, _ewww, FIL-iaaa_, _BLESS _you!"

This time she laughed boisterously, even a bit vengefully, up in the general direction of his voice. "_Bullseye_!" she threw back impishly. "And in what way could someone like YOU issue a BLESSING?" Tears, giggles, snot-eruptions, and braying laughter: Yes, he always had that sweetly confusing effect on her.

"Germy dragon," he quipped. She couldn't see him but she could tell he was close. "I can do whatever I want! My _heavens_! That's the _last_ time I kiss _you."_

"Hardly, and I know that you know that I know it!"

"I _what_? Ahaha, Filia. Look, I'm sorry for being so mysterious earlier. It's just a…habit of mine. Heh."

"You're better?" Her question sounded more like a hopeful declaration, as her laughter died. She reached for a tissue and dabbed at her nose.

"Darling Filia," Xellos's voice softly rumbled somewhere above her. The sensation of him levitating just above her bed no longer carried with it the foreboding that it might have the past five hundred years of her life. No, it was oddly sheltering now.

She grinned sleepily and stretched as he continued, his sultry, dulcet tone unchanging, "_Ahem_. It is my duty to inform you that you snore at a volume that rivals thunder."

It took Filia, dopily and blissfully sprawled under him, a moment to realize that she had been insulted.

Her tail snaked out from her nether regions. "OH! Oh, you…_YOU!!"_

"Hehe. Just being honest."

This successfully destroyed Filia's Elysian peacefulness. "You big_ JERK, _I was TRYING to ask how you were, and there you go INSULTING me!"

"YOU sneezed on ME," he retorted, with mock pompousness. "Ahaha, anyway, I am much better… though…It's lonely lying on a cot by yourself." Then he made a sound between a growl and a purr.

And Filia felt those same gentle, warm hands flirting with a button and preparing to invite themselves up under her nightshirt. Xellos began to hum some melodic tune in a voice that shook with his own continued laughter. "Dum dee dummm…" He sank back down, on top of her. He laughed smokily. "Very lonely indeed. Pity the patient?"

Filia shrieked, with a bit more enjoyment than she'd have liked to admit.

Xellos laughed again—this time that freaky teakettle giggle of his. "_Pleeaaase_? It's been _weeks_."

For some reason, no matter how very much she desired to oblige, the thought of him smugly tittering at her predictability and her starstruck girlishness, there in the dark, made her furious. She flung the be-mucused tissue up at a rough estimate of where Xellos's doubtless devilish face was. A whooshing sound followed as he dodged this attack, and then, to her dismay, the tissue landed back on her face. She squealed and flung it out of the bed.

Xellos hooted. "Score one for Filia!" The hoot became a tittery cackle.

"_Creep_," she snapped. She lashed around in the blackness, trying to find some part of him to punch or smack. "You…you smell like…" Good things. Tasty things…

"I'm in heat," he purred. "Got the itch, really. It's like an animal with musk. Heh. Whatever you most crave, I'll, eheh…emanate it."

She gasped, then yelped, in mortification and intrigue, all at once. He smelled like pastries, flowers, and sweets when he "had the itch"? "That's weird." She tried to sound grumpy, instead of wantonly turned-on. Her voice was a bit husky, as a result.

Xellos chuckled amicably. Damn him for knowing her so well and being so whimsical about it. "_O-ho_, Filia, darling, I was simply issuing a request for…" The bed jiggled a bit as he landed on it. Filia felt a bare toe brushing companionably against her thigh, wiggling and poking it playfully, as he shifted about, getting comfortable. "For…hehe, _hellewww_…" Poke, poke, went the toe of Xellos against the leg of an ever redder-cheeked Filia. "…ah how do I put it diplomatically…ooo, here we are, listen, I thought up an alliteration…_Filia, O my maiden_, _I solicit some sating, suitably steamy se_—" 

"_SHHH! Val might hear you!" _

Xellos erupted into more frantic giggling, precisely the giggling that seized him when he was dicing, charring, or impaling a foe.

Charming.

Then the mazoku rolled up against Filia like some damned playful purple-haired panther on a tree branch. At least this time he was kind enough to muffle the sound of his maniacal laughter, but the trouble was, he had decided to flop out across her midriff, and now his head was in the crook of her arm.

God, the smell, the SMELL! Vanilla and ginger and rain, cotton candy and lilacs and maple sugar, baklava and cake batter and pumpkin pie!

DEAR GODS, what WAS he, one big pheromone-inducing scent gland?! She let out a trembling noise.

Mazoku in heat! GODS!

Filia was ready to explode in multiple ways. "_GET OFF ME_."

" 'Val might hear'!" The whole bed shook as Xellos silently convulsed with still more giggles. He was heavy for a creature whose only true form was astral…Oh _gods, _how his lips tickled the inside of her arm! "That is one smart one year old, who already knows how to put together complex sentences, and about the _birds and bees_, no less!" Then he had the gall to traverse up her forearm with little kisses, speaking slyly between each amorous assault. "Might...be…traumatized…"

"_Ohhh shut up_!" 

"Or, _oho_, maybe your pet Jillas might walk in on us!" The bed started shaking frantically again. Little snorting sounds came out his nose at his effort to stop cackling. "I can just see your face right now," he added somewhat breathlessly, then the bed shook again. "God, can't you hear him in that—ahaha—that cockney squeak, '_Mistress Filia, wottah yew dewwin wivvat monstah?_' AHAHA. _Heeehe_. Hoo."

"_GOD. You are the most self-satisfied, smug BASTARD I know!_" she roared. "I—"

"…_TSSH." _As abruptly as he'd burst into wicked laughter, so did Xellos now bolt upright, every muscle taught, his deceptively beautiful young profile outlined in the cold dim light of the moon through her shutters. His finger pressed to his lips as he looked past her, out the window. He no longer smiled, nor did he frown. His was the blank, alert, predatory posture of an owl having caught sight of a plump, juicy little mouse.

Filia tried to banish her immediate sense of unease. "Oh, that's RICH, Xellos, but I won't fall for another prank…"

"_Quie_t, Filia." It was softer than a whisper, but it was a command, without a trace of levity. Then, "Well, drat. I've got to go."

"What? WHERE?"

"Pardon me."

And with a crackling, whirling sound, and no further ado, Xellos vanished.

Filia's jaw dropped. Then she scowled. She seized a pillow, which still smelled of his many alluring scents, and screamed into it in pure frustrated release. She flopped back on the bed.

" 'Thank you for taking care of me, Filia.' 'You went through so much for me, Filia.' A single measly 'THANK YOU, Filia'! I _hate_ him!" she muttered.


	4. The Last Open Door

**Limbo**

_**A Slayers Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia**_

_**By Amber S. ("AmberPalette")**_

I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. These are the property of Hajime Kanzaka. 

This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy.

The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing.

R&R and enjoy!

**Chapter Four: The Last Open Door  
**  
"You know I'm a whore. I don't believe in principles, in case you haven't noticed. I'm post-ideological."—Philip Johnson

"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."—Dante Alighieri

"We win justice quickest by rendering justice to the other party…We who seek justice will have to do justice to others."—Mohandas Gandhi

"All that I'm living for  
All that I'm dying for  
All that I can't ignore alone at night  
All that I'm wanted for  
Although I wanted more  
Lock the last open door  
My ghosts are gaining on me.  
Should it hurt to love you?  
Should I feel like I do?  
Should I lock the last open door?  
My ghosts are gaining on me."  
--Evanescence

"There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor?" –James 4:12, Holy Bible, NIV.

Filia thoroughly cleaned house the morning after Xellos vanished. Top to bottom, every spot, just to make the point to the mazoku, when he returned, that she had been thoroughly put out by his disappearing act, and his failure to clean up after himself. She was sure that he would feel the sting of her indignation!  
Well, okay, maybe, maybe not. But it was worth a try.  
She was also still a bit…hungry…after his overtures and the many tasty scents that he had emanated, the night before. This was one reason why she changed the bedsheets. The lovely smell of them was a tad maddening.  
Around noon, she had changed Val, fed him, and put him in his playpen. She donned a simple white and peach trimmed cotton peasant shift and sturdy work boots, and went out back in her kiln pit. She prepared to fire five shelves of teacups that a favored patron had pre-ordered.   
That was when everything that the past year of blissful tantalizing, courtship, détentes and agreements had built was destroyed.   
The event that shattered Filia's painstakingly formed paradise lasted less than an hour.   
Funny how life worked that way.  
An explosion the size of a moderate seismic twitch knocked half of her bone dry unfired wares over, shattering them. Filia was enraged by whatever irresponsible sorcerer, the likes of which were already scant in these outlands, had precipitated this. She flung down her forge shovel in a huff and stomped up out of the pit, tripping over a few kiln bricks on the way. "EXCUSE ME," she bellowed into the forest from which the eruption came, "BUT I'M TRYING TO RUN A BUSINESS HE—"  
"MOVE, FILIA!" A familiar nasal male voice, and she felt herself swept off her feet and teleported from one side of a cluster of oaks and maples to the other. The sensation of being teleported by another being was not a pleasant one—rather like the forceful popping of one's inner ears when rising in flight in a pressurized chamber, and all on a sea of arctic cold darkness known as the Astral Plane. Then a loud POP and the dragoness and her rescuer were again in breathable physical light. Filia yelped in protest and was, even more familiarly, dropped on her hindside by her rescuer, who grunted and teleported with a sharp crackle-fizzle back to their original location.   
"XELLOS!" she roared.  
"STAY THERE!" he roared back, brandishing his staff in front of him, crouched forward like a hungry wolverine. He peered fiercely into the deeper woods to their left, both his eyes open and aflame in violet. "And be QUIET! I've been at this target since last NIGHT, and I need to finish my JOB!"  
Her face blazed in outrage at his condescendence, until her eyes flickered across a piece of dugout, scorched earth, where another explosion meant for her had apparently gone off.  
Well. Okay, she had to remember to thank him later. Perhaps with a kiss, or more. That had been almost heroic of him.  
Almost.  
Well okay, FULLY.  
Filia fanned her face, trying to feel a bit less girlishly flustered and a bit more aware of the threat at hand.  
Xellos had snuck into the underbrush, moving remarkably like a panther at the hunt, on all fours. He reminded her of some kind of male Amazon warrior. He was soundless.  
Then he gave a little snicker. A malicious little snicker. Filia had heard it when Valgaav had come at him head-on, that "hit me with your best shot," snide laughter, that cool-as-cucumber grace of assassination maneuvers.   
Filia hated to admit it, but there was something hypnotically beautiful about Xellos's deadliness, and his efficiency at being so lethal.   
And indeed, what appeared to be a very ancient man, long-bearded and saggy limbed, emerged from the nearby foliage, racing straight past Filia. She screamed and pointed at the man, who turned into a craggy, winged wolf before her eyes, in a useless, weary attempt to outrun Xellos. It beat its wings for but an instant before deciding to continue to run on foot.  
The mazoku priest-general soared upward from the underbrush, into the air, just shy of the canopy, with a savage ease that seemed almost suspended in slow motion. He was smiling, smiling so calmly, so peacefully, like some kind of angel of death, his sharp staff tip turned down in an impaling gesture.   
Filia looked away. She heard the crunch, the crash, the struggling, and finally the descent to stillness.  
She turned back, and saw the old wolf pinioned under Xellos and twisted to one side. Xellos's staff was raised at the ready, the bloody bauble at its tip glowing. The wolf he had cornered became a man again. A strangely composed old man. "Got me, you did," the victim croaked. "It's been quite a chase, hasn't it, Xellos Metallium? But I did it for you…to make it enjoyable. You know I'm willing to die, if it is so mandated by your Mistress."  
Filia could not breathe.  
Xellos gave a ferocious sneer. Rarely-seen lines of contempt curled up the skin of his nose and lips. Blatant contempt. "I know your story. You're a fool," he spat—it was vitriol, his voice, acid that Filia had never heard him use, not even while he was in the process of butchering a foe. Playful, even snide, yes, but never such a concession to actual rage. As he spoke, wolf-like canines in the sides of his mouth flashed, and his amethyst eyes acquired a blazing heat that made them nearly ruby.  
"Why am I a fool?"  
"To willingly accept judgment—to allow yourself to be destroyed, when you can oppose, and survive—there can be nothing more foolish," the mazoku priest-general snarled, somehow further baited by his adversary's total calm.  
"Xellos…" Filia ventured, feeling an uncharacteristic timidity to match the Beastmaster's uncharacteristic disgruntlement.  
"Quiet," Xellos sizzled at her, over his shoulder. His eyes were now blazing crimson, the lava-red irises contracting farther and farther to make his reptilian pupils mere black dagger slits. In such a beautiful young face as his, the effect was particularly terrifying.   
She jumped, goosebumps rising on her arms, and fell, for once, prudently silent.  
"To one for whom self-preservation is paramount, I can see the soundness of such logic, yes," the old man coolly interjected, nodding—even smiling. "But you and I must respectfully part company in this domain—principles are more to me than survival—meaningful loyalties more than meaningless life."  
"Your 'principles' will matter little once you're dead, and can't defend them." Xellos closed his eyes, raising his staff, a bit of his nasal smugness reobtained. He shifted weight to one side, a jaunty contrappasto that dared the graveness of the situation to make him anything but the maliciously whimsical Peter Pan that he was. "Gods and their disciples—this is always their pointless argument! Beastmaster Zelas spoke the truth after all…I hate to be so rude, but to do anything that is not necessary yields only catastrophic results, regardless of good intentions."  
"Then you should be delighted." The old man still smiled. "Because mazoku love catastrophe and chaos, don't they?"  
"What a riot you are. I need never fear hunger among your kind." Now Xellos's tone was arctic, and dangerously soft. "You killed your own children for their treason to your state, out of 'principle.' " He laughed—a high, quiet, cold sort of giggle. "Now I've heard everything."   
Filia shuddered. She had just that moment been thinking the same thing as the so-called "monster" in their presence.  
"You find me disgusting?" The old man blinked impassively.  
"No." Xellos loomed in his face. "I find you revolting. And quite stupid. Quite, quite stupid, in a tragic, trivial sort of way." Another of those high-strung giggles bubbled in his throat, snorted in his nose, threatening to ring out.   
Filia prayed for the horrible, jaded noise to die before it escaped his mouth.  
"Revolting—really?"  
"Yes. And amusing." Oh gods, there it was again, that laugh. So different from the rumbling, contented purr Filia heard when she lay in her bed in the mazoku's arms—deadly arms, but, to her, they were a shelter, a shelter that felt like a firm pillow, that smelled like lavender, and a cinnamon pastry, and…and that musty scent of distant wet earth as the protons in the atmosphere shift their charge to negative, receptive electrons before a thunderstorm. The Xellos she had become accustomed to was so different.  
So different.   
She hated it, that gaping abyss between Xellos with her, and Xellos in the world, Xellos in his element, Xellos, perhaps, for real.  
It had been more comforting, almost, before, when he taunted her without censorship, the way he might taunt any other overly sanctimonious comrade-in-arms, or any other ingénue, an easy target for a masterfully sophisticated, hard-seasoned, worldly creature as him to ridicule.   
His tenderness that had come with this new season, the tenderness that, apparently, was genuine, when he looked at her now, and held her, and kissed her, made meals for her and made love to her, flitting in and out of her abode every week or every couple of weeks, for a blissfully pleasant, casually amorous visit, was agonizing.  
Agonizing…because it made her temporarily forget who and what a consuming part of him was, and it made the recollection all the more wrenching:  
Ma. Evil.  
Mazoku. Evil race.   
Monster.  
Rotting garbage.  
Cunning murderer.  
Smiling, funny, charming, uninhibited, sweet, handsome murderer, of dragons and humans and fellow mazoku alike. Pawn and child-slave of Zelas Metallium. That was what her lover was.   
Oh gods. Oh gods, oh gods. She had opened Pandora's Box and seen the discrepancy between what she wanted and what she could have, saw them dangerously merging, and she felt, suddenly, beyond damned.   
"But, oh dear, most of all, I find you tiresome. Woe is you, eh?" A playful lilt entered the Beastmaster's voice and demeanor as he bounced back on his heels, raising high the staff once more, jolting Filia out of her dismaying reverie.   
His eyes—gods—his eyes opened. The cat-slits were now dilated with feral excitement, anticipation. "If you won't fight, then die—I prefer to kill quickly, anyway. The sad duty of middle management, as I always say."  
"Oh, Xellos, please don't," Filia heard her voice, oddly faint and far-off, pleading fruitlessly. She cursed herself for not carrying her mace—then cursed herself even harder for not being able, at this point, to use it on her lover anyway. Her lover. Gods. No.  
"Orders, Filia," Xellos chirped the expected excuse, his staff still mercilessly poised over the old man's chest. "They're just orders. Go inside, alright, put the kettle on? We'll have our tea, just let me finish my orders and go wash my hands."  
"Orders. From Zelas?"  
"From Beastmaster Zelas, yes. Whom I must kill, I must kill, if she commands it."  
"Even if she said to kill me?" And she was so upset, so afraid, so devastated by herself and by him, that she did not wait a second before adding, "I think you WOULD. I really do. After all…you already were willing to do so once, to break the barrier in the temple of the ancient dragons. That is disappointing. YOU are disappointing, Xellos."  
The staff wobbled a bit.   
Xellos's shoulders stiffened then relaxed.   
He sighed—at the moment, it sounded more irritated than troubled. "If you don't go back into your hut, Filia, and tend to Val, and make your pots, and mind your own damned business, I'll be halfway persuaded to kill you now." He turned briefly to smile at her—it was the stiff, twitching smile he always proffered when she was annoying him with her highfalutin moral protests—and his eyes, half-hooded, were, if anything, bored.   
This disdainful response, though it was not so mechanically impartial, or treacherous, as she was braced for, was strangely stinging.   
However, Filia had achieved her ulterior goal—in the period in which her meddlesome questions had distracted the formidable mazoku priest, his prey had wriggled free of his bonds and cast a ray wing, flying away, then teleporting to a safely remote astral location. She was startled to see this—apparently Xellos's victim had been another mazoku—a resident, no less, of Wolf Pack Island, if his other form were in any way a telltale sign.   
Her idle surprise was quickly interrupted, however, by a livid Xellos seizing her shoulders.   
His eyes were maddened. They were…bare, somehow.  
"YOU—DAMN, FILIA! DAMN, DAMN!!" was all he managed, removing his hands and making helpless fists on either side of her face—and she didn't know the furious creature hovering over her and screaming at her, the tantrum-seized creature, through the unflappable, smugly self-satisfied Xellos with whom she was accustomed.   
She backed against a tree, tail lashing, part of her battle-ready, but most of her stunned at his utterly unbridled rage. She was sure he was equally stunned, for even as he railed at her, he blinked furiously, eyes ambivalently opening and closing in rapid succession, forcibly trying to restrain himself. Multiple veins pulsed against his forehead, temples, and neck. "He…AWAY…DAMN!" he roared, a fourth time. The only thing that kept him from looking like any completely off-kilter human man was the fact that his face remained a placid alabaster hue, and never flushed an angry red.  
"You already said that," she squeaked, rather unwisely, though able to muster a weak scowl.  
"FILIA! DAMN!" He slammed each bared fist into the tree, to each side of her, causing a small earthquake, causing a shower of splinters in her hair. His staff was dropped somewhere behind them, in the grass, in the antithetical, animal frenzy that was clearly disturbing as much as empowering him. "SHABRANIGDO! DAMN! FILIA!" His brows knit helplessly.   
And it was like he knew some unseen, secret wall that he had been dancing around for their months and months of courtship, with the dragoness defiantly and possessively clutched to his chest, some awful barrier, was now being erected between them impenetrably, block by block, before his eyes—and, somehow, because of something Filia had done or said. He was behaving like an excitable port village fishwife watching her husband's barge sinking in a storm, running helter-skelter, to-and-fro, on the docks. Filia couldn't fathom as to why.  
For some strange reason, his helpless fury, and the nervousness, the agitation, of it, struck her as amusing. The dragon-killer, the most powerful of mazoku created under one of Shabranigdo's five lords, helpless, because of her.   
Maybe there was something a touch unholy about the way Filia relished the power she felt over Xellos, in that moment. She swallowed back a giggle and added, "You already said that too…"  
And Xellos sort of slumped over her, past her, leaning into her as though his exasperation that she didn't recognize this great, unspoken crisis was destroying him, and he bellowed the most puzzling thing of all: "DAMN YOU for KNOWING I could NEVER do it!"   
What was weirdest of all was the fact that he looked utterly agonized when he said this. As if the very admission were causing him personal pain. As if something in the astral plane had pierced him through the gut and were draining him, emptying him, just by having said it. "You have to HEAR it, don't you? You have to KILL me so you can hear it!…I…I ..L…L..." Each time his tongue tried to curl itself around what he was saying, he sank lower, knees buckling, as though the air were poisoned. He turned away briefly, pasty of complexion, and did she see a nosebleed starting?   
No, it was an illusion, mazoku did not bleed. Mazoku did not feel.  
But…  
He looked like a human man ready to vomit on the grass. He shook his head, giving something up, giving something up for good. "If it is not a necessity…why AM I…?" His voice trailed for an instant. Then he looked up at her again. "I could never do it."  
And oh.  
Oh, if looks could rend apart galaxies.  
The humor was gone, all of it, from the entire situation. He had never looked that way towards her before. She had only seen him injured twice before, and this, this accusatory, betrayed agony, surpassed even those two attacks of the distant past, vicious defense-strikes by Valgaav.   
"Well? Isn't that ENOUGH?"  
Filia's eyes brimmed. "Isn't what enough? …D-do what…?"  
He straightened, face to face with her again, spreading wide his arms. "We were never supposed to actually address like that! I thought you realized that!"  
"Address WHAT, Xellos?"  
"She only gave me so much leeway!"  
"She WHO?"  
"Beastmaster Zelas, who else? Addressing it directly…I'm telling you, it's not permitted! Is it so far beyond your capacity to believe me? Your lack of cooperation is AMAZING!"  
"Addressing WHAT directly?" At last sufficiently irate, Filia pulled out her mace and swung it in front of him—her useless ritual gesture of threat. "How can I cooperate if you only speak in all of those sneering, obtuse little half-truths? ANSWER me STRAIGHT!"  
Xellos sputtered at her. He backed away, arms arched up and fists bared. "You just ASKED me if—! And then you BLITHELY passed judgment withou…all answers have to be so ABSOLUTE for you, don't th… FIL…! DRAGONS! GO FIRE AN AMPHORA!" And with this supremely childish retort, his eyes narrowed, then closed, and he went very still, almost like some kind of sunning crocodile. She almost expected him to open his mouth and bare a row of fangs.  
A pause between them, considering for the mazoku, bewildered for the ryuzoku.  
And then Xellos, who was suddenly cool as a cucumber again, sneered. Oh, now she knew him. Now she knew him well. He opened his mouth, fangs bared, eyes so callously closed, verbal razor at the ready…  
"Oh," Filia scoffed, her fear, and awe, and finally her touched gratitude, lost to disgust, and to the determination to beat him to whatever insult he'd crafted. "It's you. Namagomi. I thought you had gone away…a long time ago."  
His mouth closed. Then it opened again—twice, before he found his cool, acerbic retort. He leaned calmly against the tree against which he had, moments ago, all but pinioned her. "Yes," he purred sardonically. "It's me, O 'pure, sweet one,' it's the 'filthy, rotting' monster. I've never left, little girl…"  
"I am five hundred and twelve years old. I am NOT a little girl…"  
"And I am one thousand and twelve. I warned you, 'innocent' one. I told you—I told you what you were risking, at the outset. You can't say I didn't…" He inspected his fingernails, a silly and idle gesture, for he was wearing his gloves. He licked his lips, and added, condescendingly, "…darling."  
"No," so politely, so rigidly, did she nod in agreement. "No, I know, you warned me. I know." Tame agreement. Tepid. They had never once been tepid to each other before. In hate or love, in battle or orgasm, never tepid like this. It killed her and a small part of her really believed it killed him too, somewhere in some unseen recess of his vagabond soul. Maybe.   
"I always credited you with judgmentalism, and narrow-mindedness, Filia. Never stupidity. But if you are so stupid as you seem right now," he continued, melodically now, carelessly and as though she had not interrupted, "so stupid as to forget the things I said I WOULD have given you…the other things that I withheld, refrained from, things that were natural and nourishing to me, so as to preserve YOUR happiness…"  
"Now, Xellos, I never said…"  
"Shut up, little girl, it's not Sunday. It's the demon's turn to preach at the angel." He put a finger to the tip of his mouth, smiling, one eye closed, the other opened, brilliantly amethyst, deceptively alive. Smiling through that proud, cruel smugness—and the smile was strained.   
It was then that she realized, somehow, she'd actually hurt him. Someone she had truly believed to be so emotionally remote, so shallow, that he was invincible. "Xellos, please…"   
She'd been mistaken. "So if you don't see what risks there were to my very existence by those acts of mine…if I were one of your gods, you might even call those things I did for you 'sacrifices'…but if you're that stupid…why, then go live your trivial little life." He laughed—that awful noise again. " Yeah, yeah, do that. Throw your lifetime of moral obligations, inexperience, clumsy guilt, on this easy target." He placed a hand on his chest. "This… 'trash.' And be free."  
And suddenly, violently, with the sound of crackling lightning and a tornado vortex, Xellos vanished.   
And he did not return for several months, at which point Filia slowly built the resolve, in her severed heartstrings, that she would never see him again.


	5. Pandora

**Limbo**

_**A Slayers Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia**_

_**By Amber S. ("AmberPalette")**_

I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. These are the property of Hajime Kanzaka. 

This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy.

The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing.

R&R and enjoy!

**Chapter Five: Pandora**

"What ravages of spirit  
Conjured this temptuous rage,  
Created you a monster  
Broken by the rule of love?  
And fate has led you through it  
You do what you have to do  
But I have the sense to recognize  
That I don't know how to let you go  
Every moment marked  
With apparitions of your soul  
I'm ever swiftly moving  
Trying to escape this desire  
The yearning to be with you  
I do what I have to do  
But I have the sense to recognize  
That I don't know how to let you go  
A glowing ember, burning soft  
And burning slow  
Deep within I'm shaken  
By the violence of existing  
For only you  
I know I can't be with you  
I do what I have to do  
And I have the sense to recognize  
But I don't know how to let you go  
I don't know how to let you go."  
--Sarah McLachlan

"We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. "  
- Tom Stoppard

"…You're teasing the panther  
Pissing off a monster…  
Every time your feeble grasp inches toward stale regret  
I'm watching and waiting.  
You can pick the apple, child. I urge you to do it.  
Just remember as you dine  
You can never take it back."  
--SorrowisaPanther

Filia often wondered, after Xellos left, if there really was a space between Yin and Yang, that ideal, complete gray formed by the copulation, the mixture, of the two…  
Or if the only way opposites could function was to ensure that they remained pure, distinct, unwilling to bridge their sacred gap, existing precisely because they were not each other,…  
Able to breathe, and have an identity, because they despised each other…  
Feeling perverse comfort in the continued existence of the perfect enemy…  
Defining themselves by what they absolutely were not…  
And, thus, each one, Yin and Yang, eternally fragmented.  
Was that the truth? Had that been his lesson to her all along? Had it been the gods' lesson too? That despairing truth that had driven Val, as Valgaav, insane?   
She certainly felt the incompleteness these days. She felt like a potsherd.   
There was cruelty in the fate of that day, that hot summer day so many months after Xellos vanished. He had vanished the previous September. It was June now.   
On this cruel June day, after a long sleepless night, she was thinking about him again…every time she thought she'd banished him from her mind eternally, like the dandelion that he was, the beautiful weed, her mazoku popped back into her mind. Val had begun walking, and it had made her wonder what Xellos might have said. How he might have playfully taunted the infant-turning-toddler, or coaxed him toward the victory of crossing the kitchen floor without stumbling down once…with that curious fairness, that almost-kindness, he had displayed towards the ancient dragon child ever since he and Filia had first kissed….  
And, too, on this cruel June day, Filia had closed the mace and ceramics shop to just have a holiday. Only one person that she knew would be saucy enough to stride through the "closed" signed door anyway.  
Only him. Her damned dandelion.  
So imagine her almost toxic surge of excitement when she heard the door rattling open. Filia rushed down the stairs, swallowing all pride, ready to apologize, to bargain, to get back what she'd lost…  
The visitor was not Xellos.   
An extraordinarily tall, big-boned young woman with short, tousled hair the rich deep green of a well-tended summer lawn strode in circles round Filia's shop. She was clad in full dark, ocean-clue armor of some lightweight but firm alloy, looking like some figure conjured from Amazon or Spartan lore. Only her sun-kissed midriff and thighs were revealed, and they appeared nearly as firm and robust as the metal. In one hand she held a three-pronged weapon that looked like the trident of Poseidon. "Not half-bad, these," she offered over her shoulder in a husky alto, while lifting up a krater that Filia had coiled a few nights before, "but the decoration on the lot is all but crude. What a horrible use of slip and glaze."  
Filia bristled. "Perhaps then you should take your money elsewhere, miss," she snapped. It had been a long night with Val, who still had colic—Xellos had known just how to massage the infant's back to make that colic go away, but Xellos, Xellos, he was gone now, gone—and so the little ancient dragon had cried through three of Filia's five hours of sleep. She was ill-suited to rude customers today.  
When at last the brusque visitor turned to face the affronted dragon, laughing as harshly as she had spoken, her face proved pretty in a broad, blunt sort of way, the eyes the same dark blue as her armor, narrow and discerning and segmented down the bridge of her nose by two diamond-shaped strokes of indigo war paint; the whole look of her nearly screamed "don't bullshit ME." Filia felt a powerful urge to chastise herself for immediately comparing the woman to the long-absent Xellos, and to nearly giggle at their utterly opposite characters. She imagined Xellos, with his slinking, sleek, polite, pokerfaced ways, trying to have tea, or even a mere conversation, with this loud, be-muscled creature of brash frankness, and her giggle found tittering release. She clapped her hand over her mouth, blushing, and muttered an apology.  
"What's so funny, sweetheart?" There was both challenge and boisterous friendliness in the woman's voice now, as she grinned uncompromisingly, and Filia began to think she'd judged the newcomer too swiftly. An inexplicable unease, however, remained in her chest, and she hid her tail, which had popped out, under her nightrobes.  
It would hardly be the first time that she had hastily misjudged someone, though. From her Great Elder to her great love…  
Filia tried not to let her amiable countenance falter. "Oh, ah, nothing…I was just…thinking about a dear old friend that…I haven't seen in a while."  
"Yeah, NO KIDDING? HAHAW!" To her consternation, the woman brayed another laugh, hands on hips, swaggered over and clapped her on the back. "TRUST me, he's been thinking of YOU. Why'd ya think Deep Sea Dolphin sent her servant to have a little chat with ya?"  
Filia's blood froze. She gazed more closely up into the eyes of her forthright visitor and shuddered; the tell-tale reptilian slits, harder to see in the center of such dark cobalt irises, signaled the visitor's true species.   
This woman was another mazoku—a servant of one of Shabranigdo's five subordinates.   
"The name's Riksfalto," the newcomer announced, more gently somehow, offering a hand to Filia, which, in her shock, the dragoness did not reject with her usual sanctimony. "General Riksfalto. Heard a whole…whole…WHOLE lot…about you. My boss and Xellos's boss—ha, dare I say his name, look at you blushing—well, they're sisters, and close ones at that, though they rule opposite corners of this world. They've gotten closer if anything, since the weakening and loss of their three male siblings: I'm sure a shrine maiden like you has heard of all the ways she ought to know and abhor King Dynast Grausherra, Hellmaster Fibrizzo, and Chaos Dragon Gaav, yeah? That little Ancient Dragon kid up in your bedroom used to be Gaav's slave, even, Lord Dolphin told me….anyway. The ladies get together. Have chats. Beastmaster Zelas is a little concerned about her warrior-priest at the moment. Apparently he's a little distracted from his duties of late—even botched a mission for the first time in his life, a few months ago. No, wait, two, and almost died in the first, apparently he came here to recuperate. Sheesh. That smirking bastard just doesn't MAKE mistakes. So. I think Beastmaster Zelas had Lord Dolphin send me here to shut you up."  
"Shut me up?" Filia's hackles rose again.  
"Haha! WOW. Yeah. You live up to that reputation of indignation." Riksfalto strode over to a stool and sat down on it like a yogi—in truth, hovering just over it, subtly flaunting her powers. "Yeah, to shut you up. Sorry, I don't like pulling punches. I think it demeans one's opponent to do so." She held up her hands in a pacifying way when Filia bristled still more. "OR their allies! Easy, honey. Easy. Anyway yeah. To shut you up and get you out of his system…ah…somehow."  
Filia scowled suddenly, severely, at the dusty kaolin-caked floor. "I was pretty sure he'd already done that for himself."  
"Then you underestimate your effect on other beings considerably, duckling." Now Riksfalto was levitating several plain white bowls that Filia had recently fired, and systematically shooting holes through them with little fireball spells. "What? Oh. Relax, I'll pay for them. Anyway. The best way, I think, to get over Xellos Metallium, is to demystify him. Get more concrete facts about who he is. Learn he's not such hot shit after all. Move on."   
"We have arrived at a dilemma," Filia breathed, "because I'm not so sure, if the feelings between us are still alive…that I WANT to get over Xellos."   
Riksfalto stopped destroying Filia's pottery instantaneously. She crouched low on the stool, looking for all the world like a blue-plated armadillo, or a panther ready to strike. Or a sea urchin, as better suited her origins. Regardless, she looked quite menacing. "Hey, listen. I'm not here for negotiations, sweetie. I'm here to do a job or impose consequences. He's a mazoku. Your l-o-v-e will quite literally KILL him. Now if you DO care so much, lettim go."   
Filia did not believe her. She did not know why, but she knew, somehow, that it was all far more complicated than that. Nevertheless, she reacted quickly, regrouping, preparing to feign submission. "Alright," she managed a quaking, defeated tone, despite the fire in the pit of her stomach to treat this Riksfalto to the mace with which she had always given Xellos's head bumps and bruises.   
"Good chickie. Alright, darling, ask away."   
"….Anything?" Filia's palms were suddenly clammy.  
"Yup. Anything."  
"…You've been sanctioned to tell one of the ryuuzoku anything about the fifth most powerful mazoku in our world? Your superiors…"   
"Let ME deal with my superiors, chickie. I'm allowed to occasionally have an idea of my own. Just ask away."  
"I…see." The dragoness turned and gazed out the nearest window of her shop for a long moment. Opposite the view of the dense birch forest, this was an expansive field of sea grass, cattails and wildflowers, with a beach about a quarter of a mile in the distance. Thinking himself most clever, Xellos had one day brought Filia a bouquet of violets, dandelions, and chicory. Just as she was lulled into a crooning and blushing state, the mazoku had whipped out an alternate bouquet of that scratchy sea grass, tickling her mercilessly, while issuing his teakettle giggle—in front of five customers considering the purchase of a ceramic tea set.   
The customers had gawped as an enormous goldenrod-hued lizard burst into being in their pretty blond ceramics-seller's place, took out the east wall of the cottage in rampaging pursuit of the purple-haired man, and chased him through the tall grass, all the way down to the beach.   
Several patches of the field were engulfed in flames in the process. The purple-haired quarry never stopped laughing and making obscene faces at his enormous yellow attacker.  
Another ordinary day.  
Presently a summer cloudburst jeweled that itchy sea grass, that field rich with memories, in drops of water.  
Even the scorched places.   
Filia smiled conspiratorially out at that field, willing it to promise her still more memories to come. She smiled very much like the person that she was thinking of.   
"Hello?" Riksfalto barked. Her fierce, blunt face seemed terribly alarmed when Filia turned that haunting priest-general's smile on her.  
"Oh, I'm sorry," the dragoness cooed. "Nostalgia."   
"Uh…huh. Anyway. Your questions?"  
"One that I have always had: Why does Xellos always say, 'that is a secret?'"  
Riksfalto threw back her head, mouth ajar, and gave a silent, knowing laugh. "Ahhh. Yeah. Because that's what he is. A secret. Even to himself." She leaned on her trident pensively. "I wonder how the little prick'd react if he knew that less powerful mazoku like me know something about him…that he has no idea about…heh."  
Filia's throat tightened. "Which is…?"  
The maritime general fixed a gauging scowl on her. "Do you really wanna know that?"  
"I won't know until you've told me, will I?"  
"HA." Riksfalto smacked her thigh. "I like you! Nothing but straight-shooting and common sense! I wonder if ole Xellos is infatuated with you because you're a novelty to a sugar-faced liar like him!"  
"Xellos doesn't lie, he tells truths with timely omissions," Filia heard herself parroting her lover's own words, and even beginning to understand them.  
"OH! DOES he? HA."  
"And don't change the subject, please."  
"Very well, okay, I consent." Riksfalto held up a hand. "I gave my word, to tell you anything. But be advised, there are consequences for all knowledge. There is another world, with people who call themselves Christians. They've a Bible, yeah? And it says the world began with a place called Eden, and it was paradise because the first human beings there were ignorant of all things, and left it all up to their God, until they ate a forbidden apple and acquired knowledge of profound things. There's a guy named Faust in that world too, who sold his soul for knowledge. It garnered ruination for all these people. If you're going to be like them, and open Pandora's Box…haw, listen to me, mixing my metaphors…"  
Filia's hands clenched into fists. "I am quite sure that I am ready for whatever repercussions there are for my acquired knowledge. This will not be the first time I have learned something shattering and come out the stronger. And…it wasn't ignorance that marked the innocence of these people of which you speak. Rather, it was their faith. Their 'ruination' came from acting out of a lack thereof. Maybe you can't understand any of this, General Riksfalto, but I have faith that I will be able to handle Xellos." Her brow furrowed. "I…love him."   
Riksfalto visibly recoiled. "That's enough out of you, chickie. None of that L word. You convinced me, I'll spill. Have a seat—I'm not gonna catch you when this information makes you swoon."  
Filia swiftly obeyed, feeling a strange endurance, a quiet power, surging up inside her after her analysis of Riksfalto's words. A determination. "Go ahead. What doesn't Xellos know about himself?"  
"Something very crucial, actually," Riksfalto said, while strolling about the shop and resuming her casual destruction of ceramics. "I'm told that you have the typical dragon prejudice against my race. Xellos's race. So it might interest you to know, Lady High-Horse…"   
She paused, turned, sneered, and catapulted two slip-painted calyx kraters against the wall behind Filia—barely missing each side of the dragoness's head.   
Filia let out a small scream, cheeks reddening in shock and protest. "Spit it out already, General!"  
"It might interest you to know," Riksfalto bellowed over her, features drenched in sadism, "that your darling Xellos was not always a mazoku." She planted her hands on her hips. "He was a human. The 'namagomi' was one of those precious fragile creatures that your kind loves to lavish with mercy and pity. Digest THAT."  
What?  
Human. Human. What did that mean? Human. Pores. Cells. Blood. Semen. Tenderness. Anger. Joy. Tears. Sweat and sinew and sleep and dreams and fears and hunger and fullness and sex and death, loyalties and attachments.   
Love.   
Fragility.   
Xellos. HUMAN?  
No. YES. Oh WAIT, YES.  
Suddenly, oh, it was like a thousand jigsaw keys, a hundred thousand mosaic tiles, a million stars conspiring in gorgeous full alignment. Filia understood everything she had ever not grasped about the pecularities of Xellos, why, as a mazoku, he had wriggled his way into her good graces as no other mazoku had, why there was some strange remnant of a soul to his words and his gestures.   
She saw now why he had always exhibited a casual, but indisputable, interest in the human race—one more profound than the puppetmastery and cruel play of most mazoku. Why he had helped save the world, with such tenacity, against Darkstar, only a couple of years ago. Did he even know why himself?  
Or was THAT, his very origin, the secret that he had never learned…?  
"Gods," Filia breathed. Somehow she had ended up on the floor, leaning heavily against the potter's wheel. Riksfalto stood over her almost smugly, arms folded, as she croaked, "He doesn't realize it, does he?"  
"Nope," the buxom general snapped.   
"But he…knows there is SOMETHING about him…that is special, different from the other mazoku…"  
"So he takes pride in it, and says 'that is a secret,' to anything that he is unable to tell others, as a sort of…inside, private joke to himself. Yup. You got it, chickie."  
"….What happened to…to change him into…"  
"Into a 'filthy monster?' " Riksfalto's smile was, now, less than kind. Mocking. "You almost passed out just knowing the tip of the iceberg, you sure you wanna submerge deeper, Miss Sinless?"  
"I must!" Filia gasped, straightening sharply, indignantly. "You WILL tell me! RIGHT NOW!"   
Dolphin's general barked a laugh. "If you didn't have so much courage, and I didn't admire you so much for it, I'd run you through for backtalking me, dragon egg! I can see why Xellos finds you maddeningly appealing—so annoying and yet so brave! Ha! But alright, very well." She offered Filia a hand up.  
The dragoness took it, stood, and hobbled to the door. Facing outside—facing the last place she'd seen Xellos, that underbrush where he had captured an opponent and had been himself skewered by her lack of faith in him. By now it was late afternoon, and the fireflies were coming out. Like fallen stars. Like their future. She reached out and caught one in her hand. Fallen but not lost. Not lost. "Please continue, General," she mumbled, watching the precious glow of yellow-green light pulsating in her palm.  
"Very well, chickie," Riksfalto rumbled behind her. Filia did not turn and look at the general as she related a story known to only the highest ranks of Ruby-Eyed Shabranidgo's subordinates. Gods, the irony of the universe. "Xellos," the boisterous female mazoku began, "was murdered in his human infancy."  
Oh gods, oh gods. Filia's vision became obstructed by moisture, but still she kept a level gaze on the firefly.  
"Gets worse, chickie. His human mother—Medea was her name— killed him by smothering him with his blanket, when he was a baby, to 'heroically' save a whole camp of hiding refugees during…some war. You know, it was probably the early stage of the War of the Monsters' Fall, now that I think of it. Beastmaster Zelas Metallium became his new mother."   
"I…see." Filia cupped her hand and let the firefly flee back into the ever-darkening velvet canvas of reds, pinks, ambers, and ultramarines that was the sky. "….I thought it was supposed to stay light longer in June…"  
"These matters make all things, and all times, seem dark, Filia." Riksfalto spoke her name for the first time, with a note of respect. "I'm, ahem… surprised…and I admire…your composure at all this. It was said that you were kind of…full of theatrics and feelings…and I hear that …l…heh…l, o, v, e…makes tender feelings amplify…"  
"We must all grow up sometime." Filia managed not to sob when she said it. "Please go on. About Xellos."   
"…Yeah. Anyway. After the human baby was smothered and died…and its human mother and her kind fled…the Beastmaster happened upon it, looking for fodder to turn into new troops to protect her borders during the war. She took his body and rebirthed it as a mazoku's, that day over a thousand years ago. She made him so that he would assume the form of a fully adult young human male. A beautiful, beautiful man. Who would suspect such an innocent and beautiful creature as him of evil? Heh. The deception of things."  
"Xellos cannot be evil," Filia broke in, quietly but firmly. She pressed her fingernails into her palms until the pain distracted her sufficiently from her fear of speaking out yet again towards Riksfalto. "Not fully. I don't expect you to understand this, but I simply…I simply know it. I have walked among humans. They are not fully evil or good. A trace of them must remain in Xellos. It must. There are some things that…that I feel…wonderful things, when I am near him…that even HE cannot feign so well."  
Riksfalto made an almost pitying sound in her throat. "Be careful not to shatter what remains of your heart, chickie. Xellos has no memory of his past life…only vague sensations of it, like a dream we have, a wonderful and disturbing dream, that we can't quite recollect when we've wakened. Yeah? Anyway. I think Beastmaster Zelas fancied the idea of corrupting something as pure as a human baby, as pure and frail. She liked the irony of having created something when mazoku are supposed to only destroy. So, to capitalize on her own amusement with her genius…and to save time and effort, I suspect…she made Xellos BOTH her priest AND her general. Which explains for that bastard's phenomenal power over the rest of we generals and priests…little prick's really got it made. Even got loaned out to Fibrizo for a while, he's so endowed with dark forces."   
Filia slumped against the doorframe. Val began to cry, and call for her, upstairs. "Excuse me…" She took two strides before freezing in place in realization.   
She knew why Xellos was behaving so gently towards Val. She KNEW now! "Xellos…is a kind of hybrid…"  
"Kinda. Cept he doesn't remember ever being anything but a mazoku, and he doesn't call actively on any human traits to go about his business the way a true hybrid might."  
"But he has those vague recollections…and they might be enough to explain why he feels strangely about…about mothers…" Filia remembered the haunted look in Xellos's eyes when he had spoken of Filia's "maternal sacrifices" that night so many months ago, lying on his cot healing, "and why he can relate to…"  
"To your son?" Riksfalto nodded up the stairs. She yawned.  
"Y…YES!" Filia hugged herself against the shocking jolt of serendipity. "He must have had some kind of memories of …of a changed life, even…even if muddy…when Val was reborn under my care, when he hatched, but Val was once a dragon-mazoku hybrid, not a human-mazoku one…so…so that may be why…when Val was Valgaav…Xellos hated him so much more than any of Gaav's other servants!"   
"Mm. Yeah. It's entirely possible he senses enough of his previous life to feel those things, even if he doesn't know why," Riksfalto said, in a tone that clearly conveyed she couldn't care less. She polished the prongs of her trident with her palm. "At any rate, other business presses down on me! Damn. I seem to have whetted your appetite rather than sated it…I may check in on you in a few days, to see if you're really keeping your word and dropping this 'I heart Xellos forever' business."  
The dragoness's eyes slid towards the towering mazoku general. "Feel free," she said guardedly. She moved to the potter's wheel, sat down, trying not to let her fingers tremble so much as she took a chunk of clay and poured water over its surface, attempting to center it. It wobbled with the mark of amateurishness she had not displayed since a hatchling.   
"Be it on BOTH our heads otherwise, dragon egg," Riksfalto persisted, lifting a finger in a Xellos-esque fashion, and winking. "Leave mazoku to mazoku, and dragons to dragons. Good evening." She loomed to the door, rapped her trident on the steps, and vanished.  
Filia jumped at the whooshing sound of General Riksfalto's departure, and at the seeming black hole of negative sensations collapsing in after her. The clay that she had been trying to center went flying off the wheel, into Filia's lap. A sharp piece of sediment barely sliced open her palm—in the same scarred place that she had cut herself trying to give Xellos nourishment so many months ago. She sat back, closing her eyes, exhausted with the weight, the uncanniness, of this new information, and of how she might possibly proceed from here.  
At that moment, Filia could have sworn she felt a chill up her spine, that surging mix of anger and pleasure that always meant HE had come, and a hand curling itself gently around her injured palm. "Xellos?" She opened her eyes, shooting bolt upright, immediately upon the brink of tears again.  
No one was there.  
No one she could see, anyway.  
Xellos.  
The echo in her head was excruciating. The loneliness.  
Xellos? Please?  
No. He wasn't coming. He just wasn't. And she had not known, she had not KNOWN, and yet she, and he, both of them, had judged each other, had judged and turned away, like hasty presumptuous fools. And it was over. OVER. He was never coming back, the mazoku, her beloved mazoku, who had once been a human.   
For Xellos did not take unnecessary risks. Not twice.  
Filia leaned forward on her wheel, covered in mud and bleeding from more profound places than just her palm, and she wept and wept.   
Only Val's repeated cry for "mommy" brought her back from the emotional abyss over which she was hovering.


	6. Regression

**Limbo**

**(Another Slayers Try Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia)**

**By Amber S./"AmberPalette"**

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

**Chapter Six: Regression**

"On Raglan Road on an autumn day  
I saw him first and knew  
That his dark hair would weave a snare  
That I might one day rue  
I saw the danger and yet I walked  
Along the enchanted way  
And I said, "Let grief be a falling leaf  
At the dawning of the day"

On Grafton Street in November  
We tripped lightly along the ledge  
Of a deep ravine where can be seen  
The worth of passions pledge  
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts  
And I not making hay  
But I loved too much, by such and such  
Is happiness thrown away

I gave him the gifts of the mind  
I gave him the secret sign  
That's known all to the artists  
Who have known true gods of sound and time  
With word and tint I never did stint  
I gave him reams of poems to say  
With his own name there and his shiny black hair  
Like the clouds over fields of May

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet  
I see him walking now  
Away from me so hurriedly  
My reason must allow  
That I had ruled not as I should  
A creature made of clay  
When the angel woos the clay he'll lose  
His wings at the dawn of the day" –Irish trad.

"...and so, since I've obtained considerably greater leverage, but also greater territorial responsibilities, to uphold at Beastmaster Zelas's corner of the Red World, as the result of the deaths of Hellmaster Fibrizo and Chaos Dragon Gaav...well, I was thinking I'd ask you one last time, Lina, if you were interested in a position under me, helping me to carry out some of the dirty work, as it were, for a handsome monthly sum and a great deal of black magical amplification in thanks from my Mistress..." Sipping tea.

"Xel, come on. I realize you're obligated to make these pitches for your 'Beastmistress,' or whatever, but when have I ever willingly helped a mazoku?" Around a mouthful of heavily seasoned fish fillet.

"Ahhh, excellent observation. Oh well! I thought you'd be obstinate, but orders are...orders."

"...You look kinda gloomy all of a sudden." Gulp of wine. "Can't be just because I said no to your offer."

"What of it? Isn't a mazoku permittedfeelings?" Snappish. Clinking the teacup down. "I hate tea."

"WOAH, there! I think that's the first time I've ever heard you actually sounding something aside…like….cheerfully numb. Yeah like…EVER. What's eatin' ya, big boy?…Heh, what, or who?"

Silence. "Well...that is a secret. Heh. I really do hate tea...and ceramics...and the color pink. I loathe pink. Pink is the color of death."

"Huh?"

"DEATH."

"Uh. Okay. Jeez. You think you're such mysterious and amazing shit, but you're just SO predictable."

"Pardon?"

"Look, I already heard." Smirkily. "About you and Filia. Chin up. You two have so many tiffs, I really doubt this one is any different, or any harder to fix. It's almost like some kind of weird lovers' ritual to you two."

"Why did you ask, then, if you have my future so neatly mapped out?" Sulkily. "And you have no idea...the things she said...what she implied, after all I had done…why ask?" Pulling a disgusted face. "There is too much sugar in this tea. I hate tea."

"HA. Why? Because. I like messing with your oh-so-wise and aged mind."

"You're as great a son of a bitch as I am, under that smile, aren't you, Lina?" A trace of amusement now. "Admirable. I salute you. Like so." Raising his teacup again. "...I REALLY hate tea..."

"I won't deny we're often on the same wavelength, you and I. And NO is NO, so stop flattering me. And quit REPEATING yourself, I got it, you hate tea. Boo, tea!"

"Aw. Typically, flattery gets me everywhere." A pause. "Did I mention that I hate tea? Heheh. Heh."

"Yeah so ANYWAY. You'll recall my..." Shudder. "...sister, Luna, is a Knight of Ceiphied."

"...Uh huh?" Curiously.

"Just like Filia was a priestess of Ceiphied once, and still draws her white magic from the Flare Dragon."

"...Uh...huh." Flatly now.

"Well Luna's been on a bloody rampage for months, demanding that I ask you what the hell gives with the way you treated the 'little dragon priestess' so nastily. So SPILL, mazoku-boy. It's a matter of life and death for me. Spill, and then go kiss and make up. This falling out bullshit is pretty damned awkward for the rest of us."

Casual averting of eyes. "…Your sister totally stole my hairstyle. Do you know how freaky it is to see myself with boobs?" Sip.

"DON'T CHANGE THE SUBJECT."

Down slams the teacup. Heads turn. "Lina, why don't you follow your own advice and cozy up to the altruistic blond in YOUR life?" Sharply. Very, very sharply.

"W…Why are your eyes open?" Shocked.

"I'm really pissed at you. That. Is. Why." Overly ennunciated. Smiling, but there is a strange tic, a twitch, in the corner of his lip.

"You NEVER get pissed!"

"Don't I? Or am I good at hiding it?"

"…Er…"

"Maybe I get happy. Maybe I get sad too. And CRUSHED, when someone brings up a fresh wound, just to placate her NOSY HAIR-COPYING SISTER. Maybe you JUST CAN'T TELL." Twitch.

"Er I uh…shit…"

"I'm having fantasies of dicing you into little cubes right now, salting you, and covering you in mustard and pickle relish, and EATING you, for bringing up this vexing topic. Got it?" Extremely cheerful, polite, amicable tones. Twitch though. Twitch, twitch. TWITCH. "WELL?"

"...DA-YAMN." Oddly impressed. "You really DO love her, don't you? MAN is she ever under your skin! C'mon, what are you waiting for? Go cuddle your muffin-poo. Ha. This kind of makes you a freak of nature, you realize that? A mazoku in LOVE." Taking a hearty chomp out of the fish. And another gulp of wine.

"Don't use that disgusting word on me. It's a filthy word. It makes me SICK."

"Love."

"Like the color pink. And TEA."

"LOVE. I wonder how that's possible..."

"...LINA..."

"Love love LOOHOOOVE!"

"Agh." Nauseated. Twitch. "Stop."

"LOVELY LOVISH LOVE! FLUFFY PINK DRESSES, GOLDEN TAILS, BLOND HAIR, BIG FAT MACES! CERAMICS AND TEA! TEA TEA TEA! LOVE LOVE LURRRVE! HEY EVERYONE, THIS GUY'S TOTALLY IN LOVE! WITH A DRAGON! THEY HAVE SURMOUNTED THEIR DAUNTING SOCIO-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES AND EMBRACED EACH OTHER! HAR!"

A chorus of awws from fellow diners scattered at the various restaurant tables.

"Our socio-WHAT?" TWITCH. "I said stop, damn it…"

"Give the loverboy a big round of applause, folks! In honor of his romance with the lady-dragon, drinks are on the house!"

Thunderous applause.

"I hate you." TWITCH. Redfaced. Violently blushing. For the first time in his 1012 years. "You have no idea how cruel you're being, Lina. It's almost enviable, to a mazoku like me."

"HA!" Brassy. "Whatever, boo hoo. Go get her, tiger. You know you miss her."

"Have a dreadful day, Lina." Snap-whoosh. And Xellos Metallium teleports away from the irritations of being reminded of what hurts him the most.

Fleeing as fast as he can from the concept of feeling anything at all.

Filia was peeling lemons that afternoon in early July, to make Val his eagerly requested midsummer lemonade, when she looked up, and there, there, after months of utter severance, there HE simply was.

Funny. She hadn't felt that surge of rage and pleasure that usually heralded his arrival. She hadn't felt anything.

It disturbed her.

She had never felt so much like she was in love with a mere ghost.

Yet there Xellos Metallium stood. In the foyer, blocking the sun, in an obsidian version of his usual priestly garb, and with three blue and orange slashes of warpaint on each side of his face, and under his eyes.

Filia nearly wept. The response was the same type of impulsive, quivering overflow of emotion one might feel at the end of an exhausted nightlong vigil for sunrise. "You're back…" Why did she feel so uncertain now?

Because his eyes were closed. Xellos had begun to habitually keep at least one eye constantly open around Filia, before he had left. Now he refused to proffer such earnest, and sincerity. And there was that dreadfully impassive, pleasant smirk on his face.

"You look…different. Did Zelas finally give you that promotion…?"

He did not respond to her quietly hopeful greeting, not directly. "Peeling lemons, are we?"

"…Um, well. Yes…" She fumbled with the tool, and dropped it. The clang on the stone floor resounded painfully in her ears. Xellos's eyebrow quirked. But he did not move, even though it had fallen closer to him than to her. So Filia bent to retrieve it, feeling somehow demeaned.

It got even worse when he spoke again. "…Thinking of me, then?"

Lemons, sourness, repugnance, judgment, watering eyes. Well. "Always." She looked up, throwing the tool into the sink, suddenly desperate. "ALWAYS, Xellos…please, we must talk about…"

"Don't cut yourself." Snidely. At last one eye popped open, glinting. "This time around, I might find your pain delicious. You know, it's quite droll, the Inverse sisters are fretting over you and they tried to get me to come here and…well. Heh. They just don't realize, do they, our '_special_' dynamic?" He spat out "special" as if it were one of her lemons.

"Xellos, please don't say those things! I missed you!" Filia rushed around the table, her bare feet smacking the stones, opened her arms and leapt at him…

And Xellos stepped aside, in the last instant, emotionlessly, and let her collapse humiliatingly, flat on her face, on the floor.

"…What are you doing?" He actually sounded like he didn't know.

Filia forced herself back up on her knees. She refused to cry. Her face was like an inferno. But she refused, refused, REFUSED to cry.

Xellos offered her his hand, with cold politeness. "My goodness, you're a strange one, Filia. Dragons. Here. Get up."

She took his hand. She stood. And, mechanically, she left his side, returning to her space behind the kitchen counter. He wasn't here to reconcile. He was here to renew their ceaseless ritual of cruel banter and sating taunts. Like it had all been a dream.

Filia reached for a bag of clay. Perhaps if she threw a bit on the wheel, it might make the sting of his presence weaker. She doubted it. But she was not much good at quitting.

And Xellos just kept smiling and smiling, in that uncaring, ever-diplomatic, ever detached way. He leaned against his staff there in the doorway, somehow inhibited, apparently, from fully entering the cottage just yet. He cocked his head amicably, conversationally, and spoke: "So. Filia. How's the Fire Dragon King these days?"

Oh. It hurt, that remark.

It was not a casual stab at conversation. It was a calculated dig. That had been the very first thing he had ever said to her, directly, when they had met. She had reacted with trepidation and disgust, to such an extreme that afterward, she had always felt ashamed of her hasty judgmentalism. He could only be implying, now, that such repulsed behavior was all he would ever expect from her in the future.

Or want from her.

How awful. She would not accept this. No. Try again, Filia. "…There were many things I dreamed of doing with you while you were away."

"How quaint." He laughed airily, twirling his staff in the hand not leaning on the wall. Curiously, the hand propping him up against the wall seemed almost too stiffly pressed against it.

"Like…swimming and…catching fireflies…"

He tossed his hair. "You have Val for children's games. I am sure he is well suited to the purpose."

"Xellos, he missed you too. He took his first steps. We both wanted you there. To see it, I mean."

The mazoku sniffed boredly. "That's nice. I'm glad for him. I'm sure he'll be quite the running rapscallion shortly. You must update me on his progress from time to time." His hand against the wall became shaky from leaning so long. Still he wouldn't budge.

His smile, she finally had the discernment to recognize the subtleties of that ever-present smile, that it was not always the same. She had become able to tell when it was strained. Now was such a time.

"…Oh, Xellos…can't we…just…sit down and…just come here…please? Please come over to me."

He pierced her with his feline eyes. "No."

"XEL!" A shrill little voice pierced the conversation. Both adults' heads turned sharply to the stairwell. A tiny but firmly built infant on the verge of toddlerhood, with unkempt aqua hair and enormous, penetrating gold eyes, came eagerly stumbling toward the mazoku. "XEL! XEL! Hehe, YAY!" It was Val.

Filia held her breath. The one person to whom Xellos could, in some ways, relate the most, though even he did not fully realize why.

Gods. How was she to broach the topic with him? The topic of his brief humanity, death, and rebirth?

Should she tell him what Zelas, and Dolphin, and all their subordinates, had kept preciously secret? Was their secrecy cruel control, and deceit, or were they protecting him?

Filia's head reeled. She was so tired of that sensation.

"Mama LOOK, ISS'XEL!" The little ancient dragon flung his pudgy arms around Xellos's leaning leg, nearly causing the mazoku priest-general to topple over.

But Xellos didn't look cross. "Whoops! Heh. Hi, Val. How's it going?"

"GOOD! ISS'GOOD! YAY XEL! COME PLAY OU'SIDE WIFF ME AFFA LUNCH, KAY?" The child boisterously demanded of his favorite playmate. He nestled his face into Xellos's leg for a moment, agonizingly unaware of the strife in the room. Then he giggled impishly. "You n' mommy play now! You'n me play lata! You NEVER go'gain kay? YAY XEL! WE CATCH BUGGIES AND SMOOSH EM, KAY? BIG FAT BUGGIES! Play with me F'EVA!"

Filia could not see Xellos's face as he looked down at Val. That curtain of violet hair obstructed any view of it. "Okay, Val. We'll play after lunch. You go on now."

"YAHHH! Kay BYE!" And outside Val toddled, baring his little fists over his head in triumph, singing an off-key, improvised child's song. "YAY XEL! XEL BUGGIES, XEL BUGGIES! XELLL-LOSSS!" His little black tail and wings wriggled and beat jubilantly, and a trail of downy black feathers followed him. Some rested on Xellos's shoes.

A long, excruciating silence.

Filia stole a look at Xellos. For an instant, just an instant, she almost thought she saw pain on his face. Pain, and, even more, confusion.

And incredible fear.

Then it was all gone.

And that damned smile was back. That lie.

Enough. ENOUGH!

"Why do you always smile at me? At everyone?" She flung down the bag of wet clay, balling her fists. "Xellos, I KNOW you must still be angry with me! I KNOW that I must still matter, even as a vexation!"

"A smile is a wonderful thing to hide behind, isn't it, Filia?" He said it so pleasantly, so airily, but his eyes were open and blazing, riveting her in place, scathing her. Finally he crossed the room, with electric speed. Betraying the emotions in his eyes, he slammed his staff down—face, on the other hand, still quintessentially congenial—and glided past her to the sink. "A smile is a fitting substitute for more complex emotions for which small minds and small _people_ are unsuited. It is convenient for _both _of us, then, is it not?"

"There is no need for such deception," she retorted, as her throat closed in its battle against tears. "I know everything. EVERYTHING! Your associate told me—"

"You don't mean that buffoonish female Riksfalto?" he all but sang while lathering his hands. "Ohooo_ho_ _my_, I _warned_ her not to trouble you with trifling gossip from the Sea of Chaos. I will have to…_speak_ with her…soon."

"She was trying to get me to stop calling for you," Filia plunged ahead, "but I knew…I…I HOPED…that you wanted other things! Like I do!"

Xellos kept his back turned. He snorted. "Oh, please, Filia. I was just being nice to Val a moment ago. No deeper reason for it, really."

Liar.

"You're NEVER nice for no reason! You don't do ANYTHING for no reason!"

He did not reply.

She kept going. "We both WANT this! Us! Together! Even if we sometimes need our space—like…like seasons in a year! They…they go away for a while, but always come back! Us, Xellos! In _love_!" Somewhere deep inside her she felt an idiot, _stop you idiot, stop_! Stop being so open, so vulnerable, stop _feeling_ when he doesn't!

And indeed, Xellos shuddered visibly. "If you would please refrain from using that _offensive word_ in my presence, I would be appreciative." A razor edge sliced through his words, and he dried his hands with more energy than necessary.

"No! I love you and I KNOW you love me!" And though the fear pounding in her ears, in the coursing blood flooding her cheeks and skull, dizzied her, Filia summoned the courage to seize Xellos's arms and shake him. Over and over. The fact that his facial expression, eyes again closed, remained utterly detached, if slightly annoyed, only further galled her, drove her on: "And you don't have to SAY it—your actions prove it, and I won't make qualifications about you anymore! We are _balance,_ Xellos! We are light and dark and when we are together it is proof of what good such temperance and harmony can do for the universe!"

"Stop babbling." In a gentlemanly but firm way, he pried her fingers off his arms, and stepped over to the table, taking a seat. He smoothed his hair. "Filia, I am obliged to inform you that you are making a _fool_ of yourself."

She was weeping shamelessly now, not in hysteria, but in determination, in passion, in all the things he refused to show. "XELLOS! I KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY ARE!"

"What?" He laughed, a shrill, demeaning giggle, idly finger-combing the hair that he had long since tidied. It was a nervous gesture, if one looked closely. "A 'filthy monster' whom you will 'save,' yes? Slowly detoxifying him to the noxiousness of positive feelings and thoughts? Changing his very nature? And THAT'S why I'm worth your concern and regard, because you can _set conditions_ for a creature of _chaos_, hmm? _Please_ do not tell me you are as naïve as your princess friend, Amelia. You should know that you and I both made a grave logistical error in trying to make this work. And that things will return to the way they were—tactics, maneuvers, and arguments. You are my reliable outpost of negative energy—my…" He glanced at the peeled lemons. "…my lemonade stand in the desert, as it were. An easy target. That is all."

How coldly he said it. How practically, with no unnecessary sentiment, how politely resigned.

It destroyed her. "No! We are not each other's 'easy targets!' I know what you are, and I _won't_ change that! I will _bend_—we will BOTH bend! I'm growing up! I see nobility in compromise! I do! But XELLOS! YOU ARE NOT A MAZOKU!"

"Filia, _dear_." He cocked his eyebrow. "Don't be _delusional_."

"NO! I…I mean you ARE a mazoku NOW, but you WEREN'T! I know what you _were_, though! I know it's in you!"

" 'Know' a lot of things, don't you?" he purred.

She paused two seconds, pale, clammy, afraid of the Pandora's Box she was to open once more, before thinking 'to hell with it,' and bellowing: "_I KNOW you were a h_—"

A volcano eruption. A tornado. A supernova devolving into a black hole, and suddenly the most enormous, ferocious beast Filia had ever beheld ripped right through the fabric of air itself, launching straight at her from the far end of her cottage. The reek of cigarette smoke filled the kitchen and made the room lurch before Filia's eyes.

People always say of such events, "it all happened so fast," but the hackneyed nature of the declaration made it no less true here.

Xellos turned sharply—Filia thought she heard him gasp.

The lemon peels on the floor caused the great creature—a blue-black she-wolf with a wingspan easily as wide as the entire cottage—to skid about and fall on its side. It heaved upright with a terrifying sound that mingled a howl and a lioness's roar, and its eyes blazed the clashing colors of murky blue and bright gold. Its lip curled. It charged, again, straight for Filia.

"WAIT." The sound of teleportation and all at once, everything slowed down somehow, to the likes of the surreal—for Xellos was in front of Filia, blocking the titanic beast—Xellos was holding her—Xellos was, at last, on the floor, shielding her completely with his body. He was breathing rapidly, shallowly, and Filia had to force herself, once again, to remember that his physical form was all an elaborate sham—but gods, the agitation of that breathing was so convincing. And the dragoness was overpowered, physically and emotionally, with that incomprehensible aroma of sweet and fresh things that followed him everywhere, and was cocooned in the darkness of his cloak, as she heard him begging, "WAIT, please, Lord Beastmaster…please, some deliberation?"

Oh, gods. Not her.

Filia nestled against her mazoku, shaking, burrowing deeply, as his taut limbs clutched her out of harm's way. She nearly strangled herself trying not to cry. For whatever else happened, his impulse betrayed his continued love for her, somewhere.

"Please," Xellos reiterated, somewhere above her, finally catching his breath, in a voice of effortful cheer. "Milady, please, wait. I pray you, just a tiny indulgence…" Filia felt his hands stroking her hair, comforting her secretly, with a tenderness that not the greatest of actors could have feigned. At last two tears streamed down her hidden face, and she burrowed still closer to the man that she now knew she helplessly adored.

It was NOT too late.

"Wait? WHY WAIT?" A woman's voice rang through that grating mixture of howling, roaring, and snarling. The cottage shook as the creature beat its wings in agitation. "This little whore will stop at nothing to disarm you over and over until you are of NO USE to me!"

"I never knew you cared, Lord Beastmaster," Xellos somehow managed to quip. He even laughed.

Filia looked up apprehensively, through a fold of Xellos's black cloak.

When Greater Beast Zelas Metallium reverted to her human form, a billowing cloud of that noxious smoke rising in a mushroom cloud around her, she looked very different than she had before. More weight hung on her bones, her entire outfit was black and armored, and her hair was short, spikey and fiery orange. Still her eyes were a mismatched dark blue and pale gold. Still she bore the unbearable aura of smugness and ferocity. "Yes, well, now you do. Xellos, my pet, I am not wholly amused."

"Filia is no risk to you, mistress."

The great woman guffawed. "I should say NOT! My concern, however, is for YOU. This little display simply proves all the rumors."

"Rumors of what, exactly?"

"That your attachments to this...thing…have become problematically deep."

Xellos faltered, his mouth forming, but not voicing, words. "I…that is…"

"Yes," Filia choked, ignoring Xellos when he squeezed her bodily in warning. "Yes, he is in love with me, and it is no one's fault. It just happened."

"I am NOT YET sure I don't want to EAT you, dragon egg!" Zelas bellowed. "And yet once again, you presume to lecture one who is nearly as old as your god Ceiphied!"

"Mistress, I have broken no vow with you." Xellos bowed his head to the ground as he had months and months ago when injured. "I am not in 'love' with anyone—we both know this is an impossibility for one of our race. Only just grant me one indulgence, and allow Miss Ul Copt and her son to go on living."

"Why?"

A pause. "Well, Lord Beastmaster, that is a secret. Heh."

Zelas jutted her hip, rolled her eyes, and gutterally chuckled. "My son, you shall never know how vain that little ditty of yours is when it comes to me."

"But I know," Filia piped up again. She moved up on her knees, casting them both a look of defiance. Just as before, Xellos's slick and easy rejection of the love that Filia announced to the world shook her to her core, and she found herself once again battling with trusting her mental instincts or trusting her emotional impulses. She was exhausted, she was scared, and her emotions were decidedly winning the battle once more. "I do. Xellos, if you'll indulge ME for a moment.."

"Filia, don't do this right now…" he muttered, out of the side of his mouth.

"Yes, Filia, DON'T," Zelas rumbled, moving closer, tapping her long red nails together with the threat of an enormous scorpion. "You have no idea what you are doing."

"I'm telling you, leave the room. Go outside. NOW." Xellos was trying to mutter this at Filia under his mistress's warnings.

"Your eyes are closed," she snapped back. Everything she hated about him, his arrogance, his evasiveness, the nasal quality of his voice, the way ate around the crusts of sandwiches first, the way he fizzled in and out of the astral plane murmuring her name during lovemaking, the way he left her for weeks on end, the way he didn't make the bed…all of it, petty and profound, choked the dandelion in her mind that was the lover she had so missed. "I know what it means when your eyes are closed. And I'm NOT afraid of her. I'm not afraid of EITHER of you, and I am NOT a CHILD. I am NOT your lemonade stand, and I am NOT TO BE DEMEANED AND REELED IN LIKE SOME FISH, WHILE YOU TRY TO DECIDE WHETHER YOU HAVE THE GUTS TO LOVE ME!"

Xellos turned his back on Zelas, on his mighty creator, in a supreme act of disrespect. He was THAT irate. Furious, in that pale, quiet, strangled and polite way of his. "Oh, you're NOT, is that why you were shaking when I shielded you? You don't want me to catch fireflies with you and play 'daddy' for Val anymore? That was what you wanted ten minutes ago! Selfish, pretentious shrine maiden. And you call ME a deceiver? Do I ever overtly LIE? Like YOU do, Filia?" His smile was so tense that she imagined it could shatter like a glass painting.

"I AM THE ONLY ONE IN THIS ROOM WHO HAS NOT YET LIED A SINGLE TIME TODAY!"

"Stand down, dragon egg," Zelas interjected, looming over them both, "or I will change my mind about sparing you." She held up a clawed hand, aching, it seemed, to scratch and bleed someone.

Both of the lovers ignored the omnipotent Beastmaster. There was no one else in their entire universe, no one else in that moment, but HIM and HER.

"I'm not lying," Xellos growled, his eyes slowly building heat, smoldering a purple-ruby. He clenched his hands at his sides, with his eternal self-restraint. "You just want to believe your own pathetic truth, not reality. You just want to twist me and squeeze me into your sheltered little schematic of a 'good' person—no matter how many times I prove myself to you by my own means. Because you KNOW you have me in your pure, sweet, INNOCENT little CLUTCHES. Who's the manipulator NOW, Filia? Who's the liar NOW?" His fangs became prominent.

So did Filia's. "PARDON me, then! Maybe you'll be honest with yourself and give me another chance before your DINNERTIME, Xellos!" she screamed, right in that beautiful face that she loved and hated with all her soul.

"OH! Oh, RIGHT, okay, GOOD, just in time for your resident PARASITE, yes?" Xellos's eyes turned red—fully red—whites, irises, and all. The truest of demons, but he was hurting as he leered in her face, so very mockingly. Gods, but hurting or not, he was disgusting. The most beautiful creature she'd ever known now looked disgusting. "That's more like it! GET ANGRY, GET SAD! 'Numm-numm,' eh? That's what I do, right? All I'm for? That's all you're for, too! FEED ME, Filia!"

And Filia slapped Xellos.

So hard, so loud, that it echoed—that his head reeled. He clutched his cheek—it could not have hurt him _physically, _but apparently she was yet able to shock him utterly.

He did not look at her. He straightened, turned at an angle away from her, and did not look at her. Slowly his hand drifted to his side.

And he was beautiful again.

And then his eyes closed.

Gods.

Zelas laughed, most unkindly. "I think your toy is broken now, my child."

Xellos retrieved his staff, dropped at some point on the ground near them, and clutched it till Filia could hear the wood creaking and contracting. "Perhaps it is."

Filia was suddenly filled with a fire she had never known. An excruciating clarity, a purity, a vision. She stepped between Zelas and the person that, somehow, next to Val, she had come to love more than anyone else in the world. "If you're done with me," she plunged in, feeling that fire coursing through her, standing firmly in front of Xellos, "then at least allow me to confess EVERYTHING that I know to be true of you." She turned and smiled strangely at Zelas. "And I mean EVERYTHING."

"DON'T," Zelas roared. She made a single step towards them both, her many gold bracelets loudly jangling. Then she froze. It was as if Filia had Xellos at gunpoint.

Xellos's mouth opened as though a withering retort had emerged. But no sound came out.

His eyes opened. And Filia saw ferocity. A touch of wryness. Intrigue. Filia saw the person she knew so well.

"I love you," she said. "I love you so much, Xellos."

He did not respond. His eyes began to close…

"NO." She grabbed his face.

Impassively, almost indulgently, he let her. He just stood there. With that strained smile, while she clutched his face in her hands. Under other circumstances, the pair would have looked most comical.

"And I always will. And I guess you'll be able to shrug that off. I guess you're just that way. But for what it's worth, a part of me NEVER will."

Xellos opened his mouth again. And closed it again. And opened it. And closed it. And kept staring at her, and smiling.

Watching this enigmatic, perhaps ambivalent, display, Filia acquired enough hope to stop and breathe.

Zelas came closer. "Dragon, don't you DARE…you don't know what it will do…DON'T YOU DARE MEDDLE, FILTH OF CEIPHIED…"  
Xellos did not seem to acknowledge either his "mother" or his lover. Still he stood there smiling. Smiling away eternity.

Filia tried very hard to ignore the hot she-monster's breath on the back of her exposed neck. "Xellos. I've spoken to Deep Sea Dolphin's servant…"

"DON'T!" Zelas shrieked.

"She told me all about your past, ALL about it, trying to scare me off, and—"

"STOP IT!" Zelas's claw-hands were around Filia's throat. "STOP OR I WILL DESTROY YOU!"

Filia's eyes closed as she was ripped away from Xellos, whose face was now strangely pale. The fire in Filia blazed like a holocaust, and she began to scream over Zelas: "AND SHE TOLD ME, SHE TOLD ME YOU WERE A HUMAN! YOU WERE BORN A HUMAN—IT WAS ZELAS WHO CHANGED YOU INTO A MAZOKU! IF YOU THINK REALLY HARD, YOU MIGHT REMEMBER BEING AN INFANT, BEFORE YOUR HUMAN MOTHER KILLED Y—"

Zelas whirled Filia round to face her, blue and gold eye both blazing. Viciously, she backhanded the dragoness. "YOU LITTLE FOOL, SHUT UP NOW! SHUT UP BEFORE YOU KILL HIM!"

And at last Filia paused. "…kill him…?"

Flooded with foreboding, she whirled around and looked, wildly, up at where Xellos stood.

He was disintegrating.

All the color seeped from his body. His candied violet hair went black. His amethyst eyes went white, and his skin went gray. And parts of him were slowly turning to sand, crumbling, vanishing. It was as if he were a drawing, a beautiful drawing fading away, as if some ruthless artist were behind him, invisible, and erasing him from a glass pane.

"Oh Gods…" Filia tried to say it audibly, but no noise came. Stupidly, pointlessly, she reached out to Xellos, unable to rise from the floor. "No, stay…"

"Filia?" He looked like a very confused child, as his drained eyes turned to her.

She gasped.

His pupils—they were no longer cat slits. They were dilated human pupils. "Filia?" He tried to say her name again, but it was soft, resigned, as if she were very far away, and deaf, and he weren't sure whether it would help to call out to her again. Filia saw his eyes shine. Moisture. Tears!

He turned to Zelas, something like distant fear and revulsion on his face now. "…why?" It was spoken without emotion, idly, a child's quintessential query.

It shred Filia into pieces. "XELLOS!" at last she shrieked it.

"XELLOS!" Zelas thundered it at the same time, in fearful anger, as though merely commanding that he stop expiring before her eyes would somehow fix it.

But within less than a second of their joint plea, Xellos was gone.

Silence. That unbearable silence, the kind of a sterile, cold, quiet hospital room where a loved one has died.

Gone.

Neither mazoku lord nor dragoness seemed able to move.

Then at last Zelas spoke, in a raspy whisper that sounded curiously like the voice of a woman who had been crying for many hours. "Did I not warn you never to tell him? He was never to know that it was in him. Never. A human and a mazoku cannot reside in the same body. One is too mixed up, too great a smattering of good and evil, for the other, which is pure evil."

"Then…" Filia could find no more words. "But…Valgaav…and…there are many hybrids…"

"Valgaav is merely a dragon now! He is no hybrid! Is not the same as your child anyway, it is not the same as a hybrid of extremes, dragon and mazoku, or god and mazoku! Extremes are MEANT to mix, girl. That is the greatest secret. But humans are too vulnerable, too mixed up, they cannot handle extremes. When they fuse with gods, or mazoku, it destroys both parts of that union. You little bitch."

"But y-YOU TOLD ME…YOU TOLD ME THAT MAZOKU AND DRAGONS WERE MEANT TO HATE EACH OTHER…"

Zelas droned on, growled on, relentlessly. "I tell you, it is the truth. When the two parts of human and pure creature become knowledgeable of each other, BOTH parts die. You killed your lover, girl. With your 'good intentions.' "

Filia let out the bleat of a wailing infant, and fell prostrate on the ground. She was not sure she would ever get up again.

Fortunately, further chaos was to draw her from her despair, and from Zelas's full intentions to kill her.

The sound of a crashing wave was followed by the teleporting appearance of General Deep Sea Riksfalto, in all her brassy buxom green-haired glory. "SHIT," she bellowed, "IT WASN'T ME!"

The sound of a north wind howling, and another enormously tall, sturdy she-mazoku materialized. This one had long, midnight blue hair tied back in a long wiry braid. Her armor, including a sleek, elegant sword, was iridescent green-purple, and cold, like her emerald eyes. And it was cold like her voice, as she disdainfully sniffed. "Like hell it wasn't. So everybody's darling con artist Xellos finally bit the dust? There were disturbance signs of power shifting on the Sea of Chaos, that's why we're both here, Lord Beasmas--"

"SHUT UP, SHERRA!" Riksfalto fumed, face turning the hue of a tomato. "My Lord, I SWEAR, I didn't—"

The other woman quietly laughed. "Go on, Riksfalto, dear, grovel."

"Oh, it WASN'T YOU? You 'DIDN'T?' " Zelas Metallium seethed, turning her wrath on the first appearing sub-general. Her body expanded and twisted into the form of a titanic blue-black winged wolf once more. She rushed Deep Sea Dolphin's general and pinioned her against the wall. "WHO GAVE YOU THE AUTHORITY TO BLAB ABOUT MY FAVORED PRIEST-GENERAL'S PAST?"

"What a fun show," Sherra purred, stepping closer to Filia, who felt like she was going to vomit from the overpowering negative wrath of three high level mazoku in her shop. "I shall have to report all of this to King Dynast."

Riksfalto appeared only goaded by Zelas's rage. "IT WAS THE ONLY STRATEGY THAT I THOUGHT WOULD WORK! SHE'S IN LO—"

"I KNOW what this worthless dragon whore is, to him! WAS! And now he's DEAD—for your buffoonery, Riksfalto! Were it not for your hand in this, I'd kill her, but as is…I wish not to linger here. I WISH to see YOU PUNISHED by my SISTER."

"Not your brother?" asked Sherra, almost eagerly. She fingered her sword.

Filia was not sure which of them she needed to warily watch most. Her head went frantically from scheming to screaming to fuming mazoku, like a bobbing duck's. She could only pray Val would stay outside a little while longer.

"GO BACK TO THE NORTH, SHERRA GRAUSHERRA!" Zelas frothed. "THIS DOESN'T CONCERN YOU, OR MY DEAR BROTHER!"

"Oh very well," the blue-haired mazoku general grunted, sheathing her sword. She turned to Filia, casting a considering look over her. "I expected more, really, than a reasonably pretty, innocent, average blonde dragoness, as the cause for the downfall of the most powerful child of the five mazoku lords. You know, I'm not sure why I'm gracing you with this knowledge, but I know for a fact that he really did…" Her eyes shifted to Riksfalto and Zelas, then, apparently she decided to chance what she was going to say. "… love…you. Mighty fishy, that. And it was the biggest scandal in the upper ranks, in centuries—the biggest personnel problem we've had since Lords Fibrizo and Gaav's little tiff, ha—a priest and child of Shabranigdo in LOVE. So Xellos Metallium died of a broken heart. Report for the day. Heh. Farewell, strange little dragoness." Another arctic wind-howl, and the third mazoku, General Sherra Grausherra, was gone.

A brief silence, the eye of the storm.

"That damned Xellos. I just knew it." Riksfalto broke it, wriggling under Zelas's grasp. Her marine blue eyes snapped to Filia on the ground. "Always got what he wanted. Always knew he was 'special.' Thought he was entitled to be the only mazoku would could be in LOVE! Mr. Sensationalizer! 'SPECIAL!'"

"He WAS," Filia and Zelas roared in unison. For Filia, it had been in response to the notion that Xellos could be in love. For Zelas, doubtless, the assertion that he was special.

Zelas seemed to conveniently mistake Filia as supporting her view, which seemed to skirt the love issue altogether. It was as if she didn't even recognize the significance of the word, the way the subordinate mazoku, who were constantly exposed to dragons, and humans, and other non-mazoku, could. The way Xellos could. She turned to Filia, drool drizzling in a viscous thread from her needle-toothed jowls. "You …DO have sense, don't you? Very well. For your sheer dumb courage, I'll spare you, dragoness. In memory of my son."

Filia recoiled at the hideous she-mazoku's assumption of such a holy title as mother, thinking on her own adoptive son Val, but thinking, too, that even Zelas was better than the first creature to call herself Xellos's mother…

…Xellos…

…over and over in her mind, disintegrating, his eyes so surprised and lost, and hurt…

…his last word, "why?"…

….That was a secret…

…and as it was told to him in love, love had killed him after all. Sherra, Riksfalto and Zelas Metallium had been right.

"Very well." Filia could not tell if she had merely thought, or spoken, the defeated reply. Her voice was so distant and hollow. Were it not for Val, she might be begging the mazoku lord to end her lonely existence and allow her to go seeking her lover in the afterlife. Were it not for Val, her little lifeline. But she would be a better mother than Zelas had been. Than Medea had been.

And anyway, Xellos would have been proud of her for using her wits instead of acting on emotional impulse. At this point…at this point, she owed him at least that much, in her behavior.

…Now that he was….

…She couldn't even think the word.

"Always so full of sorrow, are we, Miss Ul Copt?" Zelas licked her jowls, and beat her wings. "Very well indeed. What a delicious feast you are, after all. Come, Riksfalto. Let us not keep Dolphin waiting. I am hungry and your pain-screams will do enough to sate me."

As they vanished in an explosion of light and sound, Filia found herself standing. Val needed food. Val. Think of Val. Only of Val. Don't think of HIM. Don't picture his face. His eyes. Don't hear his grating, weirdly endearing laugh, or his smoky voice. Don't.

Val. Xellos.

Wait.

Valgaav had been a hybrid. Valgaav had confronted the irreconcilable parts of himself, and had been destroyed.

Valgaav had been reborn, as her baby, her Val.

"Mommy?" The timid voice of that very child broke the silence. "Who'those ladies?"

Reborn.

"No one important, Val." Filia made herself walk over to her child and pick him up, made herself not give in to grief-stricken hysteria.

Reborn.

What if….?

No.

No, Filia. It is time to grow up for good now. "Let's…let's eat lunch."

"Xel buggies? Wheredeego?"

"Xellos h-had to leave." She made herself keep breathing.

"…Aww." Crestfallen, the child burrowed into his mother. "Kay. Missim."

"...me too, Val. I miss him too."

Just keep breathing.


	7. Debts and Balances

**Limbo**

**(Another Slayers Try Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia)**

**By Amber S./"AmberPalette"**

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

**Chapter Seven: Debts and Balances**

"Cast your eyes on the ocean

Cast your soul to the sea

When the dark night seems endless

Please remember me"

--Loreena McKennitt

"Love of mine some day you will die  
But I'll be close behind  
I'll follow you into the dark

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white  
Just our hands clasped so tight  
Waiting for the hint of a spark  
If Heaven and Hell decide  
That they both are satisfied  
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

If there's no one beside you  
When your soul embarks  
Then I'll follow you into the dark

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule  
I got my knuckles bruised by a lady in black  
And I held my tongue as she told me  
"Son fear is the heart of love"  
So I never went back

If Heaven and Hell decide  
That they both are satisfied  
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

If there's no one beside you  
When your soul embarks  
Then I'll follow you into the dark

You and me have seen everything to see  
From Bangkok to Calgary  
And the soles of your shoes are all worn down  
The time for sleep is now  
It's nothing to cry about  
Cause we'll hold each other soon  
The blackest of rooms

If Heaven and Hell decide  
That they both are satisfied  
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

If there's no one beside you  
When your soul embarks  
Then I'll follow you into the dark  
Then I'll follow you into the dark"

--Death Cab For Cutie

He was in Filia's cottage, and she was telling him horrifying and wonderful things. Those things processed through his brain, his chest, the soul he thought he didn't have. All went black.

He saw a battle torn plain. All around him the stench of human decay. A huddle of humans, hiding. A vast army of grotesque mazoku, dragons, humans, all raging on a battlefield near the cave where they were ensconced. Coming closer. He began to cry. Loudly. Fervently. He began to sob. A sadness the likes of which he had never conceived suddenly filled him, throbbing.

"This is the end of the War of the Monsters' Fall," a man's voice rang out.

"No. It's just the beginning." A woman's voice. Strangely familiar. Devoid of hope. It made him tremor still more profoundly with that unbearable sadness. It did not fill him with delight, it did not feed him. What was happening?

He was small, and soft, and naked. That woman was holding him. Crooning him to sleep, now, after her hopeless declaration. Placing a blanket over his face. He could not breathe.

"It is better this way, my child," the woman said. Was she crying?

He tried to scream.

Smothering. He felt weaker and weaker. His limbs flopped to his sides.

All was returning to black.

Gods, devils! What was happening? Cast something! Shabranigdo! Nothing. DAMN!

He thought of the only name that came to mind, in his panic.

"_Filia_?"

All went to white.

He thought he heard a voice screaming his name. A different woman's voice, calling him. _Was_ that his name? He suddenly had forgotten.

Ah, this woman! Stirring him suddenly from his anesthetic reverie…making him feel so very powerfully as he was unaccustomed to feeling…not sadness, but anger, and joy, and irritation, and desire, and humor, and contentment, and dread….all in this one woman, with hair the color of dandelions, and skin like peach rose petals, and a very odd, very large yellow tail…

_Who is that?_

_I love her._

"_Filia…I'm_…_here…look over here_…"

"Xellos?" It had been her voice screaming for him. Now she looked peaceful, serene. She turned to him, and smiled bittersweetly, and lifted her hand. "Xellos." She was wearing white, shimmering silver-white, and she was beautiful, she was beautiful. Her hand….Was it a greeting or a farewell? They were in a field. It looked familiar to him. A field, a cottage at the end of a heavily gardened stone lane. A mace and ceramics shop. The field was full of fluffy white dandelion seeds. Dandelions. Her hair. Then she turned away.

_No. Don't do that. Damn you. You did this to me. Get back here, woman! I…_

_I love her_.

"_Why?"_

A third voice came from the blinding white now. Above his head. "That we may never know." It was a kindly voice, also female, crusty with centuries of age, warm with experience and gentleness. Quietly regal. A tiny, many-wrinkled woman with long, pointed ears and tiny, beady, perceptive eyes, carrying a staff, materialized in between the two. "But I can try to help you figure it out."

It was the Aqualord—the Water Dragon King—in her friendliest and least intimidating state, that of a tiny old woman. The form that liked to call itself "Auntie Aqua."

"Y…" He paused, gulped. "You're dead."

And then that beautiful sweet ghost with hair the color of dandelions disintegrated before his eyes, and was gone. Darkness again…pierced only by an infinite expanse of fiery jeweled warm light…fireflies? Stars? Supernovas? Where was he?

No, that was not the important question. The important question was, where had _she _gone? Where was….

"_Filia_…?" Agonizing pain. In his chest. Loss. Weight and emptiness at the same time. He grasped at his eyes, clawed and wiped. "Wait. Filia. Please wait."

_Moisture, heat in his eyes, he could not see, he could not see…a familiar sensation and yet so alien, something he had witnessed, with detached fascination, in others… but himself had never experienced…Tears? Tears! He was crying! No, impossible! No, get away, get away! I can't feel what I'm feeling! I MUSN'T, or else…_

"She's gone…Oh….AH. Damn. What is this pain for which there's no pleasure? No…reward? It is pain I don't enjoy….pain I despise…"

"It's a common side effect," Auntie Aqua observed, "of being separated from the one we love most."

He stumbled as he stepped toward the pale echo of the mighty shinzoku, going down on one knee before her. "…What has happened to me? You know what I am…what I feel right now…it is _not possible_…"

"Xellos, my boy, you yourself said, not so long ago, to a priest of my race called Milgasia, that one could not prove that the impossible never becomes probable, or even inevitable. The _impossible, _in your remarkable case,has become _truth_—though not in the way that you or the woman you love expected—yes, _love_, or there would be _nothing left_ of you here, now, because mazoku do not ever reach this place on their own. Not _ever_."

"…Please tell me what you mean."

"The good and loving intentions of the dragoness called Filia Ul Copt have gone awry against the manipulations of your elders. You have been consumed by that which is anathema to mazoku, and your astral body has been rent to shreds." The Water Dragon King spoke as if breaking devastating news to a frightened child—clearly, calmly, without pretense but also without cruelty. "You are in the spirit realm of those who have passed to another plane, neither physical nor astral. A plane of eternal rest, and peace. We stand in the threshold. I can lead you past it, into paradise, if you wish."

"_Paradise_? What place do _I_ have in paradise? Wait."

"Yes, Xellos?"

"I…I'm _dead_?" Utterly alien panic made Xellos's voice high and coarse. A shameless sob, the first sob of his entire existence, rang out against the void. "_I'm dead! No! _I was never supposed to die! Not for _millennia_! You can't do this—this is not the way it is supposed to be! It is _just not done_!"

"Oh, 'supposed, supposed,' 'just,' what filthy killjoy words." The misleadingly diminutive god leaned on her staff, even more twisted and gnarled than the one Xellos had always carried. " 'Not done,' says this babe in diapers, like he knows anything of the fabric of this universe and what it can and can't do." She chuckled.

Something new and weird inside him, a need to prove merit which was never before part of his being, burst with indignation. "_How dare you!_ _I am one thous_—"

"I am well aware of your age, boy. One thousand and twelve years is a blink in the eye for a god such as me. And for many more powers, of which you are aware, and of which you may never be aware, Xellos Metallium. Now, you must not be so gloomy, for our conversation is far from over…"

"Well _forgive_ me, but the current circumstances warrant some distress," he shakily retorted. "I know not what I am, not what to do with what I am once I figure it out." He squatted down in the darkness, staring at Auntie Aqua's swaddled feet, trying, trying very hard, to think straight. He could not grasp at a single thing he'd always relished—strife, misery, anger, and the like—to pull himself into a familiar strategizing state of mind. It was all void and bewilderment.

No one really wished to be destroyed. Mazoku might crave it, hunger for it, ceaselessly, until they reached the brink of annihilating all things.

But that was because they _counted_ on the Gods, and their disciples, the forces of _creation_, to _counteract_ them, to instill that eternal balance.

_That_ was why even mazoku could expect, anticipate, even _feel,_ love.

It was for _Filia _to balance him, always. It was _Filia_ he loved.

"Filia…" He said it again, like an incantation, like first light of dawn, like something delicious to mull around inside the mouth for a long time. It was the only piece of him that he could still recognize, all the rich complexity that was his range of feelings towards the bearer of that name. "…_Filia_."

That ultimate taboo of his race, _love_, was inextricable from what made even mazoku hesitate to invite total oblivion. That was _why_ it was taboo. Even Shabranigdo must have realized how dangerously powerful it was, so he created children who were incapable of feeling it without agony.

The greatest of secrets about love, which Xellos's race was taught simply to disdain and revile—reductively, without curiosity, without dissection or investigation—was its astounding capacity to counteract destruction.

Shabranigdo didn't want anything to give his agents of destruction a considering pause. But love did just that. So feeble, so trite, that sounded. But it was such a simple and unavoidable fact.

"_That is a secret_…which I have discerned," Xellos breathed his revised mantra into the dark, and smiled.

"You have been blessed, then." Aqualord, who had been waiting patiently through his protracted silence, who somehow knew what he had stumbled upon, inclined her head in a gentle nod.

"Yes." Blessed. How ironic, a mazoku blessed, but he had been. No longer a cog in the mechanism of endless warfare that Valgaav and Darkstar had lamented and attempted to wipe away.

Think of it, Xellos mused. Even Fibrizo, the most powerful underling of Shabranigdo, had struggled against destruction when it came to the Hellmaster's moment of truth. Even Fibrizo had felt that hesitation, when he was called to face it. Why need Xellos, a lesser mazoku, feel ashamed if he, too, hesitated, if he dared to seek more than chaos and annihilation? Why did it need to be taboo? It was merely the law of the universe—balance. That limbo in between extremes, which was existence itself.

And Filia, _Filia_—with her, he came closest to that most vital state of being.

And so he laughed, helplessly. "…I don't know what to do…"

"Peace, child. You are _not_ dead—not exactly. A shard of you remains—that is why you made it here, and are yet preserved. That shard of you is the shard that Filia learned of, from one of your associates. The shard that was once _human_. The infant boy born over a thousand years ago, who died before his first year, who was resurrected by Zelas Metallium as a mazoku. It is he who stands before me right now, speaking to me, crying, and missing the woman he loves."

"I…see. Now it's clear to me why the humans have always endlessly fascinated me…why I even felt a need, against orders, to advocate them, give them a boost here and there…because there was a tiny piece of me among them. Ha. 'Was.' It is not fair, is it?"

"As I perceive, you have learned that the universe demands homeostasis," Aqualord began her pitch. "It demands equilibrium. You have done much for the forces of destruction, Xellos Metallium, and have caused the balance to shift greatly in favor of negative forces. Your deeds during the War of the Monster's Fall still cause the gods to weep. There is a way for you to pay back that long overdue debt to me, for saving your life and Lina Inverse's from the Demon Dragon Gaav. There is a way to send you back—but _not_ as a human."

"No?" He was intrigued.

"No," she continued, "not taking the easy road, where you can laugh without malice, and cry, and feel deeply in all ways, the smells and touches and sights that mortals feel, the things that your Filia would rejoice to see, as just one more human being for whom love is _natural_…" She shook her head emphatically.

He waited, beginning to anticipate her offer, cupping his chin in his hand. "Please go on, my lord. I am willing to hear you out."

"Very well. Rather, if you wish to return my favor, you shall return to Filia's world as the thing that you were before you came here—as _mazoku_. Except for one difference. For a _mazoku_ that is now capable of _loving_ to walk among the _living_…it would more than restore that balance that the universe demands, for you to accept this challenge of feeling love. Yes, in doing this, you would repay the debt you promised me." Aqualord spread her arms wide at the void around them. "Or you are welcome to languish here for eternity and to turn down my offer, my challenge. It is your choice, boy."

Xellos nodded slowly. He stared at his hands. They looked the same. He tugged on a strand of his hair—silky, well kempt, purple, like always. But the Water Dragon King spoke the truth—something was essentially different, and might always be. "It's like…alchemy."

"Pardon?"

"Putting opposite elements together. Mixing them—finding…some kind of harmony. You'd think it would make them muddied and vile, but it actually is the only way to really purify things. Putting them together."

"Absolutely, Xellos. Absolutely."

"Heh. That's …that's ironic." He paused a little longer, before making a crucial decision. His lips pried closed, at first, in fear. At the vast, vast implications of it all.

But he opened his mouth and forced himself to say it: "Please send me back. Tell me how I can go back. To her. I don't care how. I've lived over a thousand years as a mazoku." He mustered that cavalier smirk. "I've gotten used to it, really. And so has she…so has she. My believer."

"You must promise to love her for the rest of your existence, Xellos Metallium. The balance can be restored no other way. You can return no other way."

"Mmm." He tilted his head to one side, then shrugged. "Fine by me."

"And you must promise one more thing. You must keep a great secret, from all but _one_ person—one person of _your_ choosing."

Xellos's eyes, which had become dark pools, dark with round human pupils, now contracted to dagger slits, as Aqualord silently salvaged for him his old form. She did not move, or say a word, but he felt it. He felt it coming back. "Ahh." He closed those enigmatic, electrifying eyes, struck a pose, and grinned. "I'm all ears, Lord Water Dragon King. We're square."


	8. The Space Between

**Limbo**

**(Another Slayers Try Fanfiction of Xellos and Filia)**

**By Amber S./"AmberPalette"**

_I claim no ownership of the fandom of The Slayers, including the portrayed characters Xellos Metallium, Filia Ul Copt, Val, Lina Inverse, Beastmaster Zelas Metallium, Deep Sea Dolphin, General Riksfalto, Jillas, the Water Dragon King/Aqualord, or Milgasia. _

_This is an unpolished exploration of a fandom that I have recently come to love. I have researched BOTH the anime and the manga, but not to great depths--so please don't flame me for errors. I have done my best for accuracy._

_The story is meant to illustrate my perception of the popular love/hate romantic pairing of Xellos and Filia, a pairing which is strongly implied in "The Slayers Try," the third season of the Slayers television series. I have found little satisfaction in reading the majority of the XellosXFilia fanfictions floating around the internet. They either glorify an unhealthy sado-masochistic undertone in the couple or they make unrealistic changes to Xellos and Filia's characters, turning him into a saint or turning her into a demon. Not a one of these solutions is, to me, in accordance with the canon of the anime or manga, nor is it a satisfying read. So I decided to put forth my own portrayal of the pairing. _

_Other fanfictions that address this couple that I would recommend include "The Crackpot Cafe," written by member Kara Metallium. _

_Enjoy, R&R!_

**Chapter Eight: The Space Between**

**"**_**Her index finger traced his warm soft lips once, then twice, and at** the third time mouth opened and took her finger inside. Gently sucking on it his_ _luminous eyes opened and stared directly into hers. Filia heard herself take in a sharp breath….He was beautiful….Which is why, with those amethyst eyes looking into hers, Filia felt her eyes become wet and her lower lip trembled. His eyes stared emotionlessly at her, almost fascinated by her emotional display. She wondered why he wasn't doing anything, and felt shame and stupidity for crying in the arms of the most beautiful being she had ever beheld. But those thoughts were followed by a knitting of eyebrows on his part and Xellos brought a hand to her face, cupped it, and wiped away those tears that threatened to flow from her eyes. 'Shh…' he murmured softly." _

_--From "The Crackpot Café," by KaraMetallium (H. Rach). _

"You cannot quit me so quickly

There's no hope in you for me

No corner you could squeeze me

But I got all the time for you, love

The Space Between

The tears we cry

Is the laughter keeps us coming back for more

The Space Between

The wicked lies we tell

And hope to keep safe from the pain

But will I hold you again?

These fickle, fuddled words confuse me

Like 'Will it rain today?'

Waste the hours with talking, talking

These twisted games we're playing

We're strange allies

With warring hearts

What wild-eyed beast you be

The Space Between

The wicked lies we tell

And hope to keep safe from the pain

Will I hold you again?

Will I hold...

Look at us spinning out in

The madness of a roller coaster

You know you went off like a devil

In a church in the middle of a crowded room

All we can do, my love

Is hope we don't take this ship down

The Space Between

Where you're smiling high

Is where you'll find me if I get to go

The Space Between

The bullets in our firefight

Is where I'll be hiding, waiting for you

The rain that falls

Splash in your heart

Ran like sadness down the window into...

The Space Between

Our wicked lies

Is where we hope to keep safe from pain

Take my hand

'Cause we're walking out of here

Oh, right out of here

Love is all we need

The Space Between

What's wrong and right

Is where you'll find me hiding, waiting for you

The Space Between

Your heart and mine

Is the space we'll fill with time

The Space Between..."

_--The Dave Matthews Band_

"_Tears stream down your face_

_When you lose something you cannot replace_

_Tears stream down your face_

_And I… _

_Tears stream down your face_

_I promise you I will learn from my mistakes_

_Tears stream down your face_

_And I…_

_Lights will guide you home_

_And ignite your bones_

_And I will try_

_To fix you"_

_--Coldplay _

"You're back." She takes a long drag on her cigarette. Her Greco-Roman robes shimmer white-gold. Her gold bracelets tinkle and sing as she points a red nail at him. The infinitely powerful she-mazoku does not betray relief, nor gratitude, nor any other appropriate sentiment, on her exquisite, warpaint-streaked face. However, her sea of lavender-white hair slowly stains a deeper violet hue, like that of her precious servant, as though in felicity of his return. Both her blue eye and gold eye flash.

"I am indeed, milady." Her servant bows deeply, turning his red-tipped staff horizontal and parallel to the ground in a salute.

A long silence. Then she exhales a cloud of smoke with great languor, almost purposefully stalling. Her eyes narrow. "…You…look well…my son."

"I thank milady deeply. If I may be so bold, however, it's a little drafty in here, what with my being returned to life as stark naked as a baby…"

"Do forgive me, boy," a man's voice, with the texture and thinness of sleet, interjects. A handsome, pale man with layer after layer of sharp icy blue armor and short, unruly coal black hair, shifts in his guest throne next to the woman's. His reptilian gray eyes shimmer. "My sister took the liberty of making her residence colder for my comfort, as I am accustomed to the weather of the north. Had we anticipated your miraculous resurrection, we would surely have tolerated balmier climes."

"Ahh." The servant bows to this speaker, as well. "But that is as it should be, King Dynast." He smiles like a kitten through his purple pageboy bangs. "I am thankful for your comfort, sire."

"Oh," a sapphire-haired, slender-boned woman seated in the other guest thrones squeals not unlike the maritime creature whose name she possesses. She claps her hands frantically, bouncing in her seat like a big doll, and her many rows of pearl jewelry jingle. "OH, how terribly adorable of him, isn't he just as cute and polite as ever? How very droll your priest-general always is, Zelas, dear! Oh, darling one, I am positively STOKED that you are not annihilated and all that gross nonsense!"

The servant chuckles softly. "Lord Deep Sea Dolphin is too kind."

"Yes, she is," mutters a familiar buxom, obnoxious, green-haired mazoku general clutching a trident and standing centurion at the foot of Dolphin's throne. The scowling General Riksfalto has a scar under _both_ of her eyes, now, and one looks as if it were rendered by the fangs, or claws, of an enormous wolf.

The purple-haired, prodigal servant has very good hearing. He slants his amethyst eyes at his colleague and proffers an insufferably smug, mock-saccharine smirk.

Riksfalto throws back a covert middle finger. "Bastard," she grumbles.

"Not at ALL, dearest!" shrills the blue-haired mazoku lord, clearly not hearing her comparably level-headed general. Her pearls rattle again as she again claps.

Dynast Grausherra and his braided, sword-towing general, Sherra Grausherra, at the foot of his throne, exchange coldly amused expressions, and snicker at Riksfalto's expense, and Lord Dolphin's denseness. Their laughter sounds like an ice storm on a tin roof.

"I knew something like this was going to happen," Sherra sneers to herself.

"SHUT UP, SHERRA!" Riksfalto bellows, face red with humiliation and jealousy.

The purple-haired servant averts his eyes to the ground, closes them, and simply keeps smirking.

Such a happy family.

"ENOUGH!" Zelas Metallium catapults to her feet, off the throne, leering in her priest-general's face. "Xellos, HOW? TELL ME HOW THIS CAN BE! I tire of these coquetteries and flirtations! OUT with it, child!" The great black cavern rings with the great woman's gravelly contralto. Black, murky, vaguely lupine creatures beat their wings in the shadows at the sound, and then resume their growling slumber.

Xellos Metallium looks up at his re-creator.

His eyes are still closed.

"That is a secret, milady."

"HOW DARE YOU—"

"…Even to me." He bows his head.

His eyes are still closed.

"I regret failing you in this aspect. But I HAVE returned, for good, that much I know."

Zelas digs her red claws into her favorite servant's shoulders. Somehow, he does not cringe, as she further interrogates, "Are you SURE there is nothing you wish to tell me?"

All the other mazoku present, servant and lord, lean forward, and watch, with bated breath.

The cavern on the Sea of Chaos is again

Xellos whets his lips. He considers. Long and hard. And then he shakes his head.

His eyes are still closed. "No, my Beastmaster. But I do have something I wish to ASK you. A deal…a rearrangement of my circumstances, as it were. A permanent one."

Riksfalto and Sherra make disgusted scoffing sounds. They know where this is going. They are saturated in the experience of human and godly feelings, having gone out among them as Xellos has. This is threatening, and fascinating, and weirdly alluring, though neither will ever admit it as Xellos is about to.

Zelas puts her hand on Xellos's head. "My child, I am willing to grant a single request."

"Any single request?"

"…Yes. I suppose so."

"Please sit down, then, milady. This may…take a moment."

Only the most educated sage, wizard, or sorceress notices how the stars are subtly realigned that night, as a deal to restore balance in the universe is made between a mazoku lord and her favorite servant.

Seven more months had passed on the night that Filia rediscovered how much she would always be in love.

She had not let herself think or feel. She had simply gone through motions, carefully allowed herself the tenderness necessary to be the best mother that Val could have. But beyond this, she cut herself off from all life. Val adored Xellos almost as much as his mother did, and became progressively more lackluster as the realization that his favorite playmate was gone permanently.

This only further burdened the depression that Filia constantly kept at bay. She knew the day was coming when she had to admit to Val that the person who had become her son's male role model was dead. As in his previous lives with his biological father and with the Demon Dragon King Gaav, Val was going to lose another dad. And it killed Filia, that imminently approaching disappointment and grief that her child would bear.

She never left the cottage. Business hours in the shop shortened. She rarely spoke to Jillas and Gravos, even though they lived in the same large house.

Princess Amelia wil Teszla Seilloon sent countless royal invitations to tea, in sweet, but transparent, attempts to cheer Filia. Amelia even sent Zelgadiss Greywords to gruffly suggest an outing. Through his brusqueness, he was an incredibly sweet man, that part-chimera. He told her that she looked very pretty "especially considering your loss." Filia felt a touch of comfort in the fact that, clearly, their band of friends had come to see she and Xellos as so bonded that he had been like her spouse, and that her bereavement would be that of a widow. She offered Zelgadiss tea, then politely turned him down when he offered to take her to town for the afternoon.

Only Lina Inverse was able to even get a good mourning cry out of Filia. The short redheaded sorceress showed up one afternoon with Gourry Gabriev, simply blurted, "This sucks, sweetie," and hugged Filia tightly. Clueless though he was, Gourry joined in on the hug, nearly crushing them both.

Then Filia was able to laugh when Lina barraged her blond boyfriend with four-letter words. And then Gourry grinned like a stupid puppy and kissed Lina. He then strutted outside to chop them wood to heat the teakettle.

Filia was stunned, and asked Lina who had finally convinced her to start actually dating her "protector" swordsman. Lina smiled sadly. "Let's call it Xellos's last favor to me, in a little conversation we had last year about 'altruistic blonds,'" the sorceress admitted, rubbing Filia's arm when the dragoness teared up again. "Ya know…in his weird snotty evil way…he loved you even when he was furious at you, Filia."

_He always loved you, Filia._

_Always._

Filia would always reciprocate.

And it was that night seven months later when hope returned like everything green and living.

Filia had gone outside to fire some ceramics for the first time in ages, as the result of a new local client's large commission.

She had taken a shameless liking to all shades of purple and nearly half of her vases, cups, hydrias, kraters, amphoras, and even maces had acquired that hue, via glaze, enamel, or other means. She returned at nightfall to put Val to bed. Nothing felt different at first. She climbed the stairs to his bedroom, opening a window along the way. Then she stepped into Val's room, and it happened when she reached to light the ceiling lamp and realized that the room was already illuminated.

Filia saw that Val's bedroom had been lit by a million brilliant candles. It was bathed in a heavenly, warm, soft glow. She reached her fingers to the flame of the smoldering white wax stick nearest her child's head. Her finger went right through it, and the flame did not burn her skin. It was harmless and safe. This was a powerful, showy, and yet sweetly benevolent, enchantment.

She gasped. It could not be.

She gazed down at her son. He was sleeping soundly, a content smile on his little face. Someone had pulled the covers over him, tucked just under his chin, precisely the way he liked it. Only one other person besides Filia knew how Val liked to be tucked in.

Filia's eyes were beginning to brim with terrified and yet hopeful tears as she squinted to see what Val was nestled against in bed—a fat, plush purple wolf with amethyst eyes and wings. That stuffed wolf smelled curiously of baklava, of vanilla, of musk, of the earth after rain, of cotton candy and cake and exotic spices. Of alluring and pleasing things.

Filia covered her mouth to stifle a sob. She rushed from the room, trying to be quiet, to not stir Val.

She stumbled over Val's little shoes…no, over a pair of shoes next to them, a pair of much larger men's shoes—plain, tan-brown shoes that might belong to a mysterious beggar priest of some kind. Filia had chastised their owner for not removing them at the foyer of her cottage countless times.

"Oh gods…oh GODS..." She whispered, whimpered, screamed it into her cupped hands. Her tail shot out and followed her, wildly swishing. She stumbled past the bathroom, bare feet smacking the floorboards.

She looked in. The toilet seat was up—damn him, oh how she loved him!—her toothbrush had been flung into the toilet bowl in a fit of boyish mischief—damn him, how she adored him!—the hand towels were in scrunched up disarray—adored!—the baby powder had been spilled all over the sink—ADORED!—and a beloved and familiar gnarled wooden staff with a glowing red orb at its tip was leaned against the shower door. Filia flung open the shower, tears streaming down her face by now. No one was there.

Well, she would yet find that "no one!"

…Oh gods, let it be true…

Filia dashed down the stairs, following a path of dandelions that had been laid out from the bathroom floor downward. The dandelions alternated colors—purple and yellow. She laughed and cried and laughed some more, following the path that had been made by one who had returned to her. What a sublime joke it all was!

She found poor Jillas standing flat against the wall halfway down the stairwell, a petrified look on his face, his ears flat against his skull, and his eyepatch crooked.

"Mistress Filia… G-ghost! Oi thought he…dead…? But he just…just now he …" he stammered, pointing frantically down the steps. "Y…you're cryin'! Are you okay?! Did the ghost GETCHA?! Is mastah Val okay?!"

"Oh, JILLAS!" Filia cried, and laughed, and bodily picked up the little fox man, and crushed him in an embrace. "I am, and so is Val…we are! It's all okay! All of it!" She put the bewildered creature down, kissed the top of his head, laughing still, wiping her eyes, only to cry some more with an overwhelming clamor of emotions. She ran so fast that she was flying, soaring, as she followed the dandelion path out the front door of the cottage, into that field with scorched earth, that field near the sea, that field full of tall golden sea grass and newly rising fireflies. Elysium.

"XELLOS!" she screamed, and laughed, and wept it, that name that she adored. "Oh, COME OUT, XELLOS!" She was a little girl at hide and seek with her favorite playmate, and a woman seeking her great lover, one person of no particular race in love, and all of her dragon race, as she spread wide her arms in her thin white cotton shift, as it began to rain on her, her womanhood standing out against the wet gown plastered to her skin, her joy and exuberance simply exploding. "I LOVE YOU!" She thrust back her head and spread her arms wider, and caught rain in her mouth, and laughed. "I LOVE YOU!"

Warmth. It flooded her, bombarded her gently somehow, her toes and her chest and her mouth and her head, all of her was submerged in it. That feeling of Christmas Eve. Of seeing someone who has lived overseas for years, who is that puzzle piece you need to be complete. That feeling of click-click, as the jigsaw ends unite again. She did not see him yet, but she felt him holding her, from behind. She felt his hands traversing the whole front of her body, ensnaring her middle, squeezing.

And then as she craned her neck to the side, lips locked with hers, in a kiss that was an eruption of electrical, volcanic union. She would never have dreamed so much to be possible of a single kiss.

"Filia." HIS voice.

"You're back…" Idiotically obvious, somehow, but it was the only thing she could think to say.

"You WANT me back." A hand wrapped around her tail and yanked on it.

She whirled around, and there he simply was. Silken violet hair, burning amethyst-ruby eyes, hungry and sly little smile…

Stark naked.

Filia shrieked.

Xellos laughed. He flung his head back, legs boldly spread, hands unabashedly planted on his slender sides. "I'm sorry, when you're resurrected from the dead, you don't always have the luxury of getting your clothes replaced…except for your shoes, oddly enough…I guess the universe doesn't like my brown shoes…anyway you don't look especially modest at the moment either…and…ahaha it's not like it's anything you haven't seen…"

"STOP TALKING! Oh my gods, oh…OH!" Filia fanned her face, and covered it, and, mortified, found herself being embraced by her lover, who was still shaking with mirth, and whose laugh was turning into the infamous sizzling teakettle giggle. "The…the NEIGHBORS!"

"You really think the fact that we're both out here naked…"

"I AM NOT NAKED!"

"…is going to eclipse gossip about the fact that I came back from the DEAD?"

"That is FULLY beside the…"

"No it's not. Heh."

"XELLOS! This is VERY EMBARRASSING!"

"Ahaha, Filia." He held her airtight against him. " Mmm, my Filia. Yes, I am back for good, to embarrass and irk you as thoroughly as I can." He nestled his cheek against hers, and began to kiss her jaw, her ear, her neck, tenderly.

And Filia burst into tears, taking the folds of her sodden robe and wrapping them around her naked prodigal lover. She leapt into his arms and more than bested him in a crushing return embrace. "I…I…I…" She sobbed.

"Shhh, come on. Aw, Filly." She could tell from his tone of voice that he was smiling, but not in an unkind way. It was that same fondly and wryly despairing tone he always had for her, that gentle amusement with her emotionality and altruism, and naievety. "Fil, ahaha, honey…"

"Let me hold y-you, and make sure it's real…"

"It's real. Do you remember how I told your elder Milgasia that I paid back debts? And that one outstanding debt that I owed was to the late Water Dragon King?"

Filia gulped, and gasped, pulling back, her mascara streaming in raccoon ringlets around her eyes. "Y…yes." She sniffled, as Xellos began to wipe that black mask off her cheeks. "The Aqualord saved you?"

"Yes. In return for being spared, I am to spend eternity with you. I am to cherish you—to be a living mazoku capable of such depth of feeling. Apparently this will recreate some kind of homeostasis between the gods and monsters. Yes, dear, I just scored points for _your_ side. And you know, heh…I certainly won't complain about a deal like that. I am to restore the balance that was upset when I exterminated a portion of your race, and endless Clare Bibles, a thousand years ago. When I was reborn as a mazoku."

"…you…?"

"Yes. Filia." As he finished cleaning her face, Xellos leaned in and touched his lips to her ear. "I remember. I remember what you told me. ALL of what you told me. I know. I was instructed to tell but ONE person that secret. Only one. And I chose you."

"…me?"

"You."

"Why?"

He drew back, placed his forehead against hers, and riveted her with his scrutinizing gaze. "Do you _still _not know? Filia, can you _really_ not know why I would choose you first?" He kissed her forehead.

Then he bent and retrieved one of the infinite dandelions he had scattered behind him, leading her outside to their reunion. He straightened, and placed the yellow bloom under her chin. "Let's put it this way…I heard an old wives' tale…when a girl and boy have given themselves to each other, mind, body, and soul…" Gently, he rubbed the yellow petals on the milky skin of her chin and throat, rubbed off that scent of rain and earth, and sweet-spiciness, onto her flesh. "…if that is the case, then the dandelion's head will stain their skin …" Slow as a butterfly's cocoon opening, a smile spread across his cheeks. "Uh oh. Filia. Your chin is yellow." A chuckle rumbled in his chest, and his eyes flickered from amethyst to ruby for an instant. He pressed her against him again, lips pressed to her ear. "I guess we're hopeless, you and I." He nibbled on the tip of her ear, and that earthy chuckle reverberated in his chest again.

Filia let out a little gasp of delight. She felt herself smiling back. She watched the fireflies buoyantly rising like floating lanterns over Xellos's naked shoulder in the rain. She thought, very hard, for a moment. She knew what she wanted to hear, what she thought he was saying now, but she would not ask him to say it outright.

She tried to change the subject. "I…I felt so much less…angry and…and afraid…when you first appeared…I used to feel a…a bit of a surge of those feelings when you showed up, mixed with my happiness to see you, but…now it's all good…all of it, good…I don't understand. You are clearly still a mazoku. The human in you has become dormant again, that I know."

"Ah, yes. You are correct. Clever as always, my dragoness." Xellos's hand gently, thoughtfully stroked Filia's back, up and down, in a hypnotizing rhythm, rendering her limp and gelatinous in his arms. "When I was allowed to return, my mazoku inclination to sap negative energies from living creatures underwent a slight alteration." He shifted back from her again, and his lips rested against her brow, tickling it as he spoke, like a warm wet breeze. "My victims gain from my…ah…parasitism, now. It's an unpleasant but, heh, somehow, amusingly noble, job for a mazoku. You see, darling, I don't simply steal negative spiritual energies from others now, I also in a way relieve them of those feelings. I suppose you could call me some sort of soothing wraith. The leech that actually _does_ benefit the patient by the bleeding process."

"This is the Aqualord's doing, as well?" Filia was beginning to think that she would convert religions and worship the Water Dragon King instead of the Flare Dragon, from now on.

He paused. "Partially. But apparently she wouldn't have been able to do it had I not been inclined to let her."

"In other words," and Filia inclined her head at an angle, slyly smiling, slowly, supply rubbing her lips against Xellos's. The act made him shiver slightly, and then rumble a deeper, more wolflike chuckle, as she continued, "yes, in other words, it means there IS some good in you. And considerable use FOR the good guys, the next time we have to go through some sort of world-saving epic struggle. Hmmmm?"

He jerked back, cocking an eyebrow. His eyes widened, then quickly recovered their narrow, feline smugness. "Oh, don't ruin my reputation, woman." He kissed her in return, a bit aggressively, a purr rising in his throat.

Filia giggled. "I LIVE to ruin your reputation."

"That's my line, dragoness. How dare you steal it."

"Annnd? What are you going to do about it?"

"I have…heh…no idea." Xellos stepped back from Filia. His smile disappeared a moment, and he took her face in each hand, tilting her head up so that their eyes met squarely. Many people, quarry and foe and friend, of Xellos Metallium, had called his amethyst jewels cold, harsh, faceted. But they were warm now, warm and candid. And, strangely, awestruck. At her. At her alone. "Can you believe this?" he breathed.

Filia somehow knew exactly what that enigmatic question meant. "You know…yes, I can. I can believe this. I can see it. All of it happening. I can see our centuries together, Xellos. Our millennia together. You, and me, and Val."

"It seems a little ludicrous." He blinked, and chuckled, almost apologetically. "You know what I mean. And we were the last of that weird little makeshift group of Slayers to notice it, that's the most bizarre thing of all, how Lina Inverse and her buddies were taking bets on how long it would take us to stop battling and start kissing. A golden dragon, an ancient dragon, and a mazoku, some sort of …family, heh. It just seems ludicrous, and yet so right, in a…twisted way."

She laughed, and nodded. "It really does. But reality is a strange place, isn't it?" Her eyes were brilliant with faith. "I can imagine myself with no other man. Ever."

"Filia." Xellos took a lock of Filia's eternally meandering yellow-gold hair and braided it, with the tender grace of an experienced lover and yet the flirty mischief of a little boy. "There is one more thing I should tell you before we go inside. I have been allowed to say it just once. You know." He winked. "_It_."

"No." Filia put her hand on his chest.

Because he was a mazoku, a pure spirit, and his body a congenial illusion, she once expected, and was confirmed by, the sensation of no heartbeat in that left side of Xellos's chest.

But now she knew better. And indeed, this time, a faint but steady rhythm beat against her palm. It even seemed to quicken when she looked up into his jeweled amethyst eyes, that precious, soft beating.

She had not felt such a thing before. But now she believed in its existence, against all rational evidence. She believed in its existence, because he had acted against his own reason, against the nature that some distant lord of chaos had prescribed for him. He had danced around the limitations and taboos, and shown her devotion. Had shown her reason to believe in him. Her convictions made their _own_ real, self-sufficent evidence. Filia's convictions had always been everything to her.

And so she said, "I know it without you ever saying it. I have faith in you. In us. In us working, somehow." And she sheltered her face against that rhythmic feeling in his chest, caressing it with her cheek.

"That may be, Filia. But I choose to say it, anyway. Perhaps even more so, knowing that you already believe me." Xellos's voice was a rumbling, breathy whisper. Enticing, both thrilling and soothing, like a summer breeze through grass, or distant, distant thunder. "Look at me. It will only be once, my precious believer."

And Filia looked up. In simple hope and strong faith, in her chicory-blue gaze. "I am looking at you."

At you.

Not the idea of you, or of me, or of our races, or what they are supposed to entail.

At _you_.

"Filia. I _love_ you. I really do. Every maddening detail. It's rather astounding, even to me."

She was flooded with incomprehensible warmth, all over again. Could it really be coming from him, that warmth? Her arms slid down his sides, wrapped around his waist_. Mine_. "You and me."

Xellos nodded. He felt Filia's possessiveness, and a specter of a smile began to form. "You and me." He tilted his head down and sideways, peering at her in that curious, birdlike manner.

Oh gods and she loved him back tenfold for it. "Always…regardless of other things."

"Always. Regardless of the vicissitudes. And the logistics. The kid, the past strife between our races. All of it. Heh. It should have been obvious to me before, this inevitability. I congratulate you for conceiving of it first." He traced the side of her face with his index finger. "I'll be called away many times in our eternity. But I'll always come back. Treat me as a season, Filia Ul Copt. Free-moving and flying, but constant. Like a wise little dragoness once told me. Yes?"

Filia crushed her mazoku in her embrace once more. "You are summer," she whispered into his neck, inhaling. "You smell like summer! You are my summer."

He laughed in delight, rumbling and soft, buoyantly rising from his diaphragm, his throat, and ascending to a higher-pitched melody that was almost like a nightingale's. Whimsical, unpredictable, and a little thrilling, the sound was, just like him. "I wouldn't mind the title sticking."

"I think you are a dandelion," she confessed, cheeks heating. "I have always thought of you as my dandelion." She wiped off a bit of that yellow residue on her chin, smiling at it bashfully.

He snorted. "Thanks, I guess? The evil renegade demon dandelion of DEATH…And I think your hair is dandelions."

"Oh!" She snuggled shamelessly, grinning. "A poet, too! You're a Renaissance man."

"Careful, dear, my ego grows indefinitely."

"That is a good point. A sound judgment, indeed. And true." She rolled her eyes at him, still grinning.

"Heh. I think, and correct me if I am wrong, but Val may be a bit upset if he has a nightmare, and wakes up, and we are both out here where he cannot see us. Perhaps we should go inside and…dry each other off…and check on him by and by…."

"Gods, have I domesticated the big bad maoh-wolf?" Filia giggled. "Paternal impulses, _whatever_ will come _next_?"

"You wish, domesticated my _ass_. I'll show you domesticated. HEY NEIGHBORS!" Xellos broke free of his dragoness and, in a show of beautifully uninhibited animalism, streaked all the way to the front door of the cottage. In buck naked glory. Smiling calmly and cheerfully and waving in the neighbors' windows all the way.

A moment that any heterosexual female in the vicinity would weep to miss.

"OH DEAR GODS! STOP THAT!" Filia roared in protest, cheeks the hue of beets, following him. "FALSE ALARM, JUST A SENILE OLD MAZOKU, GO BACK TO SLEEP!" She thought that somehow it would assuage gossip to scream this frantically into the windows of all the neighbors' houses. Her tail nearly tripped her.

Much gawking was to be had by the little old lady peasants who lived in the vicinity—that is, the ones who could still see or hear well enough to know what was going on. Most just shook their heads and fell back asleep.

"I'll show YOU senile!" Xellos cackled as he crawled in the open and unlocked second story bedroom window, like some sort of ungodly sexy purple haired Peter Pan. "Ahahahaha. WELCOME HOME, Xel, old boy!"

"I AM GOING TO SWAT YOUR NAKED ASS, YOU HEATHEN!"

"HaaaaaHAHA, you said ASS!"

"I DID NOT! IT…DOESN'T COUNT!"

"Swat away, my darling!"

"SHUT UP!"

Breakfast the next morning was a glowing, self-satisfied, serene feast.

Well. After noon, really, when the neighbors stopped dropping by to make sure Filia and her son were alright.

Xellos, still lacking a single article of clothing to his name, now sported one of Filia's grotesquely sugary pink robes, which had little hearts and teacups printed across the fabric, and was decidedly small—and did little to discourage the popular opinion that Filia was dating someone who lacked a few mental nuts and bolts.

He giggled in an off-kilter fashion through each of the visits that morning. This sort of laughter also did little to alleviate the concerns of the neighbors.

Filia broke some kind of world record in degrees of blushing that morning.

Val, in his high chair, laughed twice as much as Xellos, and every time either Xellos or Val started back up giggling again, the other contagiously joined in.

This exchange of joyful mirth between her boys was the only thing that kept Filia from killing Xellos the morning after he had come back from the dead.

Nevertheless, when all was said and done, breakfast—or brunch—was bliss.

"Xel's gon' teach me t'tie my shoes, mommy," Val declared, pounding his soft-chew spoon against his high chair. "Xel, w'zat you singinna lullaby to me las'night?"

"…Possibly. My singing voice is stunning, after all. And I will only teach you to tie your shoes after we put worms in mommy's spaghetti, Val," Xellos purred, taking a chomp of cereal, with one eye peeking open impishly at his little comrade in crime. "We must make up for lost time with our summer plans."

"YAYYY wormies!" Val shrieked, beating his little wings.

Filia sighed. "That's nice, sweetheart." She tilted a mock-acidic look at her lover.

"What?" Xellos grinned, opening the other eye.

"I love you," she groaned. "I really, really do. Gods help me."

His smile broadened and warmed. She knew what he was conveying to her, without being able to say it.

She took his hand and squeezed it.

He squeezed back. "You know…I once said it seemed the Lord of Nightmares was a capricious being. Perhaps it is amusing to see a devil and angel so fused with each other that they become inseparable parts of a whole. I think, Filia, that such a union of opposites is what this universe may yet be all about."

"Mommy's an angel!" Val squeaked, pointing his spoon at Filia.

Both adults smiled at him, before Filia squeezed Xellos's hand again, and spoke.

"…Yes. I had come to the same conclusions…before…before that terrible moment when you d…went away…"

"I know. I should have listened to you. After all…we had a taste of that when we fused our magic to defeat Darkstar."

"I never forgot that." Filia stood and put Val in the sink, washing him free of a mess of maple syrup and butter. Then she placed Val back in his high chair.

Xellos was watching them. He was smiling, contentedly, a little possessively. They were his, and he was theirs, somehow this had become the truth, he was _theirs_, and he was beautiful.

"And I know you think I'm imagining you as a human," she breathed, "but I'm not. I love _you_. Not what you might have been. I think we've both learned not to do each other the injustice of judgment by what we are."

Xellos's eyes looked a little hungry at that, and more than a little approving. "_Who_ we are is a bit different than _what_ we are. Mmm. I admit I was always rather fatalistic about that, wasn't I? 'Please don't forget, I'm a monster.' "

"Mm-hmm! And 'Dragons are like this, dragons are like that. Dragons are selfish, dragons are sanctimonious, dragons are violent, dra--'"

"Oh al-_right_, I know, I _know_, no reminders necessary!" He grabbed for her, fingers wriggling. His fangs showed as he grinned. She shrieked quietly, jumping out of reach, bursting into giggles mingled with happy tears as they began to both teleport in and out of the cottage in pursuit and flight of each other. He was back! And the entire world, good and bad, was back on course.

Val squealed and applauded the lights and sounds show between the two lovers who constituted the adult pair in that dysfunctional, makeshift, oddly perfect family. "MOMMY!" he jubilantly shrilled. "XEL BUGGIES!"

Two world wars have passed outside the Red World, in the world we know. Car horns and roaring boom boxes have replaced the stomp of horses, the strumming of minstrels, and the rattling of carriages. Tall glass office buildings share the skyline with clouds, churches, mosques, temples, homes, and shrines. Walmart, the grocery store, and Starbucks populate road corners, crowding out specialty shops and small trade businesses. Selfhood is a multifaceted reflection, and life a bright, loud, shallow, surreal, eerily beautiful race. It's the twenty-first century.

It's a rainy afternoon in early May and such a Starbucks coffee shop sits on a sleepy middle-class block that's a ten-minute walk from downtown. A slender woman with strikingly long canary blond hair, pulled back in a tidy braided ponytail, sits drumming her pink nails on the tabletop. Bangs hang almost strategically on each side of her face, covering the tips of her ears. The waiter brings her a third cup of green tea. She growls, fishing moodily in her daisy-embroidered purse for her cell phone.

The Starbucks door rings. In sloshes a tall, lean man. He sports some strange mixture of dress loafers, black multi-pocketed punk pants, black-painted fingernails, and yet a tidy hunter green sweater surmounted by a trim black blazer. He exudes the cool confidence of that rare man who is fully comfortable in his own skin, in every possible sense of the word.

A mysterious closed-lipped smile never leaves his face—an arresting mixture of weathered and freshly young—as he makes his way toward the woman's table. His hair looks oddly like a pageboy's, except it is pulled back in a sassy queue, the neat-cut bangs framing his face and partially concealing his eyebrows. That hair is neon purple.

The waiter gazes at him in amazement as he calmly takes a seat with the woman, because the man has never once opened his eyes, and yet has managed not to bump into or break a single thing in the shop.

The purple-haired man's grin becomes toothy as he pulls his black cell phone from his pocket and brandishes it, flashing and ringing with the tune "Bad To the Bone," in the woman's face.

"That you?" the man snickers.

The woman snaps shut her pink flip-phone and swats at the man's obnoxious contraption. "That is the corniest cell ring that I have ever heard in my LIFE." She tosses her hair and snobbishly sticks up her nose.

"Haaahahah. Filia, honey…" The man's blazer drips on the table as he reaches across it to soothingly smooth the woman's hair.

"Don't even start! And don't …GIGGLE like that in PUBLIC…"

"Haaahahahaha! Oh. I'm sorry, but you just… haaahah…"

" Stop it! I was scared. I thought you two had been in a wreck or something. Look, it's POURING out there! People get in wrecks in thunderstorms."

"Yeah, and they also fall for mysterious, gorgeous blonde women by staring in at them from outside Starbucks windows. Creepily. Like stalkers. For the past like…forty minutes, darling. The guy sweeping the steps even made a remark at me." The man now leans bodily across the table and kisses the woman.

She pulls away and shoves him lightly in the chest. "WHAT? Xellos, couldn't you have done me the courtesy of knocking on the window?"

"You looked too beautiful sitting there pining away by yourself." The man, now, personifies a cheshire cat, he is grinning so broadly. "It was gratifying to remind myself that you belong to me."

"Xellos…"

"And always have. And always will."

The woman's cheeks warm, and she looks away to hide a doting smile. "…Yes, honey, but really, did you get Val to school in time…?"

"Oh, heavens, yes…one coffee, black, thanks…and one green tea, so my girlfriend here doesn't lecture me on the evils of caffeine." The man pauses to nod at the waiter, and smile politely, peeping open one eye, and then, after a pause, the other.

The waiter, a college freshman, tries not to drool too profusely at his gorgeous stare, which has some kind of cool, cat-slit purple pair of contacts to enhance it. Then she stumbles into the back to get the man's order.

The man lightly chuckles at this, then turns back to the woman, casually playing footsies under the table with her. "Anyway, I'd not dream of making Val tardy to junior high school. Gods, what a dreadfully awkward age. At what point in popular culture, Filia, did the word 'gay' become an all-purpose insult-phrase for a disgruntled boy's adoptive father? 'Xel, that shirt is gay.' 'Xel, your jokes are gay.' 'Xel, your hair is gay.'" The man snorts. "Heavens, that dear brat, I changed his diapers half his freaking life. I taught him how to tie his shoes, and fly, and I taught him the multiplication tables. Do you know how many times I took him for ice cream when you had me babysit him? Ha! But now it's not cool to hang out with Xel. HaHA! He oughtta watch the two of us tangoing in bed some night, THEN let's see if he calls me 'gay' still...thank you, miss…" He takes his coffee and tea from the somewhat bewildered waiter. On he chats, blithely. "Heh, long way to go before she's a Luna Inverse, this one…Heheh, that reminds me of a conversation I had with Lina once…DO you know how freaky it is, speaking of her sister Luna, to see my hair on someone with boobs? Haha! I never told you about that conversation, did I—?"

"XELLOS, you talk too much!" And the woman fans her now-scarlet face, stomping on the man's nearest foot. "Sorry, miss, we'll pay the check soon… Now, Xellos, I've told him to curb his offensive slang."

The man chuckles and waves it off. "I don't mind, babe. You know I'm fond of that kid, against my better judgment. Heh."

The woman hesitates, folding and unfolding her Starbucks-labeled napkin. "But it's been…it's been good, Xel. It's been really good for him having you around. All those times he had nightmares…flashbacks of being part-mazoku…when he had to confront the memory of Gaav, and what he did in his…in his service…and you actually understood what it felt like, and just listened to him. I know it was hard for you…never feeding off his fear and sorrow…letting him come to you and…and always just…calmly holding him. And…and me as well…" The woman pauses to quickly wipe her eyes. She gives a trembling, soft laugh. "Sorry, it's that time of the month and it makes me…mushy…"

"Mm." The man just smiles patiently, eyes hooded but still open. His sporting edge seems charitably dulled, all of a sudden. He says nothing, only waits. He almost seems to delight in the free-flowing emotion of his partner—emotion that the woman wears on her sleeve, but that he reserves in a quieter and more distant place of his psyche.

The woman continues. "Anyway. I'm glad I trusted you with my son. You were certainly Val's best friend growing up, and I'd even dare say you served just fine as a father figure for him….I'm glad your Beastmaster Zelas has let you stay in our lives so regularly."

"Do her bidding, no matter how gritty or strenuous, and get the reward of a two-week vacation with you guys every month." The man raises his coffee to the woman's green tea in a toast. "Not bad, say I. Salut. It's the eternal deal she made with me, over you two."

"And I love it. And I love you."

"I…" A pause. The man looks up. He opens his mouth, then closes it. There is frustration in his face. He stands abruptly, eyes closed, and goes back outside.

The woman watches him go, considerable puzzlement on her face. She stands, leaving their coffee, slings her purse on her shoulder, and follows him.

The man is crouched over a tiny patch of grass near the sidewalk, in the pouring rain. He straightens and turns. He is holding a dandelion. His eyes are open again.

The woman stops chasing him, comes to a complete halt. There is deep comprehension on her face. She is suddenly beaming. She reaches out her hand.

He hands her the dandelion.

They are both sopping wet.

The woman steps up to the man and presses herself against him, wrapping an arm around him possessively. He returns the gesture of belonging and yearning, smirking in delight. Like two puzzle pieces, they are.

Then the woman rubs the dandelion under the man's chin. "Uh oh," she whispers. "Xellos. Your chin is yellow."

"No doubt." He slowly, devotedly presses his lips to her extended hand, eyes closing as though he is relishing something rich and sweet. His lips slide down her hand, turning over the palm. Three lingering times, he kisses a place where an ancient scar, from a simple cut of ceramic shard, still exists. Then, protectively, the man covers her hand in both of his. "No doubt, my believer."

"I guess we're hopeless, you and I." She puts her ear against his chest, listening to a heartbeat she still hears, after so many centuries, and will hear, for so many centuries to come. Smiling.

"Indeed we are. Utterly hopeless." He chuckles. It is a soft, diaphragmatic, self-satisfied rumble.

"In love. Always."

"Always, my Filia." His laugh becomes a giggly snicker then. "I wonder…." He strokes her hair, her infinity of dandelion-colored hair. "I wonder if one of these eons I'll get you and Val to convert to Lord Ruby-Eye worship…"

The woman smacks the man's chest, grinning defiantly. "Don't push it, mister!"

"Your tail is showing, darling."

"Your HEART is showing! HA!"

"Ouch." But he looks delighted. "Touche, but, dear one, I'll get you back. It's about time. We haven't bickered for forty minutes. C'mon, prissy, I'll fight you."

"I'll win."

"Oho. Whatever, dragon priestess. Maces aren't in vogue these days."

"I SAID don't push it, you stupid monster that I adore!"

"Heh. Okay, honey. Okay."

And they kiss.

And kiss.

And kiss, till forever, till all the dandelions have bloomed. And then some, just to tilt the cosmos a little bit, in their limbo of extremes ever united.


End file.
